Archive for the ‘Tips and Advice’ Category:
10 LinkedIn tips for recruiters based on common mistakes recruiters make.
- Don’t make your profile private. How will clients and candidates connect with you otherwise.
- Add your picture and complete your profile. This gives assurance that you are not a group of consultants maintaining a LinkedIn profile.
- Be available to network with both candidates and Clients. This is the reason most people join LinkedIn is to network.
- Seek recommendations from both clients and candidates. This gives your network the assurance that you are good at your job and offers an independent view of you and your organisation.
- Don’t require a user know your email address to join your network. How else will people be able to network with you and contract your services as a consultant and recruiter?
- Use the status box for general job openings. Not specific individual jobs. Maximise the limited characters and advertise all of your jobs.
- Keep your status updates current or clear it when jobs are not available. A status with a job opportunity that is weeks old or even months old can give the impression that you can not fulfil roles.
- Join Industry groups within your country and participate in the conversations so people know you. How else can you keep informed of trends with your stakeholders ?. This also gives you and potential clients more opportunity to network with you.
- Don’t ask for someone’s CV that has just joined your Network. This is what LinkedIn is if used correctly “A living and up to date CV”.
- Be responsive to all requests and messages. Clients may become candidates and candidates may become clients.
With over 300 million FaceBook users actively using FaceBook, it has become the new area for hackers to spread viruses and steal your account information.
Below are some tips to avoid becoming a victim.
- Install Anti Virus and keep it up to date. AVG is the most reliable for Social Media.
- At the moment all viruses are spread via Facebook email and Wall posts.
- If you see numerous friends posting the same message with links then contact them off FaceBook and warn them that their FaceBook account may have been compromised.
- Do not open a link telling you to go to a YouTube video with a link that uses http://bit.ly . YouTube have their own link shortener http://youtu.be .
- If a message from a friend does not sound like them. It probably is not them. Delete the message and let your friend know of the message.
- If your account does have a virus, run a virus checker and then change your Facebook password.
- If you have completed step 5, then email all of your FaceBook friends to let them now and suggest these tips to them. The more vigilant we are against this the less likely FaceBook will be targeted.
- If you click a link and are asked to log back into FaceBook DON’T. This is a common tactic to steal your login details.
- If you add people to your account that you do not know and they send you a message stating that you are in a video or pic etc then remember that they do not know you. This will be a virus.
- Join our FanPage for the most up to date information about new viruses and FaceBook threats along with the best solution to rectify the problem.
Net Mania Fan Page is at http://facebook.com/NetMania or by using the FaceBook URL shortener http://fb.me/NetMania .
Recently the media highlighted the need for small businesses to monitor their online presence. It reported that a competitor altered their competitions Google Local Business Maps details and that it took sometime for her to get caught.
Too often small businesses in New Zealand believe that they are immune to being hacked and that nobody would defame them or their business online. This results in the common thought that they should not bother to invest in online technologies to monitor their online presence.
An even more common issue for New Zealand Businesses is that they do not have any consideration for for Search Engine Optimisation or online marketing. Thus, they do not list themselves in online directories, instead waiting for an automatic listing to occur.
The media report states that a Hamilton Florist manipulated her competitors Google Map listings resulting in her competitors loosing an alleged substantial amount of business.
Google Local Business Maps is an effective and reliable free option to be ranked high in search engines and is an easy way to find local businesses in your area. You log in and add a number of details about your business such as location info, contact information, services, hours of operation and business website link.
To register your organisation in Google Lcoal Maps you need to have a free Google account.
While most organisations in the English speaking world have holidays over the Christmas period your web sites SEO results could be hampered by your competitors still being active over the Christmas break or a number of other situations occurring that could hamper your search engine results.
Other considerations to keep your site updated over the Christmas break include:
- 1. Not everyone goes on holiday
- In the quiet period people use the Internet more to find information and products.
- During the holiday break people make New Years resolutions and have a chance to think about things they need to do. Maybe your updated site will be more appealing.
If you have a Word Press web site with a Blog you can schedule a number of pre written posts to be made at prescribed by you times. This will keep your site up to date over the Christmas period and will not effect any thing that you might add to your site.
To Schedule your Posts
- Write a new Post
- In the top right hand corner is a box called Publish
- Look for “Publish immediately Edit”
- Select “Edit”
- Select the date and time you would like your post to be published
- Select “OK”
- Select “Schedule
To ensure your online brand is safe during the break.
Set up an automated system that will send you RSS feeds, Tweets and Google alerts to a low traffic account. Perhaps create a new email account only for this purpose so you will not be flooded with other emails during your break.
Perhaps once every few days you can check your online brand or even have alerts sent straight to your mobile phone.
It has been a number of months since FaceBook released vanity URL’s (your name in the URL) for personal pages and then to Groups and Fan Pages. An example is our FaceBook Fan Page at http://www.facebook.com/NetMania .
Initially a FanPage or group required 1000 members or fans to be eligible for a vanity URL.
Sometime later FaceBook publicly announced that it had reduced the limit to 100 users. Both requirements caused many small organisations to cry out and ask for the requirements to be reduced.
FaceBook without any major publicity announcements changed the criteria to a minimum of 25 members or fans thus creating new opportunities for millions of Fan Pages and groups.
Now many admins and would be creators of groups and Fan Pages are asking how to obtain their new vanity URL.
Simply log into FaceBook and then visit http://www.faceBook.com/username or as we mentioned in our earlier post http://fb.me/username .
Upgrades and add-ons to OS commerce can cost more than the original development if some basic steps are not taken before updates and add-ons are installed.
Always make a full backup of your site and download the back up for each module. Keep the backups stored away for at least a few months.
If anything goes wrong with your site from the new installation it is easy to restore your site back to its operating state.
2. Prior to any install of a new add-on or an upgrade, as a site owner you should ask your developer (if it is not you doing the install) to note the module and version number they are using and the os commerce URL. Keep these details in a log record of your site.
In the future if your developer no longer works for the same company or you change developers then there is a clear record of what has been added to your site and that record will often allow the new developer to quickly ascertain how your system works and where any current issues will be coming from. It will also allow your developer to quickly ascertain what if any security issues need to be updated on your site or the origin of error messages that may appear.
Allow you to create lists of your followers into groups. Popular lists are grouped by geography, profession and services. The lists are publicly available and followable from your Twitter homepage.
Each Twitter account can create up to 20 Twitter lists that contain a maximum of 500 people per list. When creating a Twitter list you can choose to make it public or private. Private lists are for your own personal viewing. Lists that are made public as a part of your Twitter profile and can be followed by anyone. At the time of writing lists do not appear to be readable via the major Twitter clients including Swirl and TweetDeck.
Create a Twitter List
Creating a list is a simple task but may take a long time to sort out which followers to add to your lists. You should also make your lists worthwhile to both yourself and others.
- Log into twitter.com
- On the righthand side of your page underneath the search option select “create new list”
- Name your list
- Make the list public of Private. We recommend making it private till you have completed compiling the list.
You should create all of your lists before you begin adding people so you can save time.
Adding people to your lists
1. To add people you can either
(a) Search people to add to your list via the search box
OR
(b) You can also add people from your Following page or anyone’s profile page.
2. .Select the Lists button to add the desired people. NOTE: You can select multiple lists to add people to.
Benefits of creating Twitter Lists
- Enables you to put organise the people you follow.
- By adding people to your lists the other people will see that you have placed them in a list creating an extra view or recognition for you.
- Greater networking opportunities with people in your own profession or local geographic area.
- Once you have created a great list you can share it in a Tweet.
Benefits of following Twitter Lists
- Allows you to follow a group of people with the same interest, for example SEO practioners without the need to directly subscribe to them individually.
- Follow large groups of categorised people for short times such as a project life cycle.
- Weed out the people that you really want to follow.
Your Twitter home page shows you how many and which Twitter lists you have been added to. If you appear on a list and do not want to be on it for what ever reason, there are currently two options available to be removed unless the list is malicious and breaks the Twitter Terms of Service.
-
- Ask the list owner to be removed from their list
- Block the users account. This should only be your last resort as it will stop them following you and vice versa.
LinkedIn and Twitter now offer several ways to interact with each service including LinkedIn updates as Tweets, LinkedIn as your Twitter tool, timely status alerts to your company name being mentioned in Twitter and sending urls from within LinkedIn to Twitter.
Updates can be one way between LinkedIn and Twitter or both ways by using the hastags #in and #in.
I would recommend that if you use Twitter for personal updates with friends and family as opposed to using Twitter to distribute professional information that you do not have Twitter update your LinkedIn account.
Benefits of having LinkedIn update your Twitter feed include:
- Twitter updates are searchable and a potential employer could notice you
- If not all of your Twitter contacts are a part of your LinkedIn network then this is a new avenue of self promotion.
- You can find other people to network with on LinkedIn via Twitter.
- If you do not visit LinkedIn on a regular basis then this is a great way to keep your profile updated.
- Tweet LinkedIn slides and other relevant resources directly from LinkedIn.
- See how your networks are using LinkedIn and Twitter together.
- Share what is being said about you and your organisation via Company Buzz.
Installation of Twitter to LinkedIn
Installation of all the Twitter Tools can be made via the option to Edit your LinkedIn account under “Account and Settings”.
WordPress operated web sites are so common that there is a myriad of widgets, themes and plugins freely available and able to be installed at the click of a button. This in turn increases the chances that a new installation could create issues for the web site that results in the need for a backup to be installed.
There are a number of plugins that allow a live backup to synchronise with your desktop and web server. The issue with this is that you could end up with a backup of a broken web site on both your live web site and as your backup. Thus being a pointless task backing up or restoring.
Other self help pages offer extremely complex solutions to generate a backup such as using the phpMyAdmin to export individual MySql databases and an array of other complex SQL code to understand. Then once the databases have been exported out more details describing how to use a ftp client to download the sites other files.
Easy Solution
I can not over recommend using a reputable web host that offers CPanel for their hosting.
With CPanel simply click the “Back up” icon. This will backup all of your files, redirects, aliases, MySql databases etc into a compressed file. I would recommend downloading the compressed file to your computer with either the File Manager icon in CPanel or an FTP program.
Reinstalling a backup is as simple as selecting the “Restore” option from the Backup section.
Increasingly organisations are utilising Twitter. Sadly, many organisations and especially NZ companies are doing two fundamental things wrong that will stop people following them.
Worse still with the introduction of a myriad of automated Twitter tools that give statistics on users, these fundamental mistakes will make it look like you are a spammer.
Tip 1 – Don’t ask followers to verify themselves.
Do not ask people to verify that they are a real person when they follow you. Captcha tools are annoying and difficult for many people to read. If a spammer follows you this has no effect on your Twitter account.
For me personally using such tools tells me that you can not be bothered to see if I am worth following and you will have an automated process to follow me back.
Take a moment to follow only those Twitter accounts that you are interested in.
Tip 2 – Don’t make your Organisation Tweets Private.
By making your Tweets private to only your followers it gives the impression that you are hiding illegal, immoral or otherwise objectionable material. It also makes it impossible for potential followers to know if you have interesting information so they can follow you or not.
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