By midday, the Dow Jones industrial average briefly popped higher, while the S&P 500 edged up 0.2% and the tech-heavy Nasdaq gained 0.6%.
Investors were disappointed by an industry report showing that existing home sales slipped 0.6% in March from the prior month. Analysts expected the sales rate to rise, writes CNNMoney.
The demand for prefabricated housing is expected to grow annually through 2017, according to a Bharat Book report.
The prefabricated housing industry includes manufactured, modular, precut, and penalized housing.
But even with the surge in demand, the manufactured housing market is projected to continue to decline since conventional mortgages have become easier to obtain, the report claims.
Most U.S. real-estate markets are past the worst of the housing bust, but homeowners—especially boomers—are still citing real-estate scams and mortgage frauds among their biggest complaints to federal regulators.
According to the Federal Trade Commission, real estate and mortgage issues were both in the top 25 categories of complaints for 2011 and 2012. And those in their 50s had the most to complain about, accounting for 23% of all fraud complaints.
Many boomers may be seeking to downsize from large family homes, while others are overextended or upside down in their mortgage.
Chaos is the very nature of social media. Between the endless jumble of posts, tweets, photos, updates and information, social media management can easily become overwhelming. A recent survey named Facebook the most stressful social media website. The immediacy of social media, the pressure to post daily content at optimal times and the struggle to find and post engaging quality content can cause any social media manager anxiety. So how does one keep a step ahead of the social media fray while staying current and developing deeper insights into your social media strategy? The answer is a combination of scheduling time to cultivate, manage and post. Here are 6 tips to keep your social media management ordered:
1. Create a Content Calendar:
Consider your social media content as a cross between a newspaper and a magazine. No publication prints or posts any article just for the sake of content, and neither should you. Have certain pieces of content that you post weekly or monthly. For instance, you can promote your most recent blog post every Monday, a cross promotion post on Thursday and a humorous engagement post every Friday. Your content will be different and consist of more than just these categories, but you can easily schedule your content weekly if not monthly for these time slots. Find a great article or link you want to share where you already have something ready to go? No problem, simply post that content in your optimal time and move your scheduled content to the next time slot.2. Prioritize
Know what you have to do every day, what projects are long term and what can be broken down into bits. A social media manager should schedule in time every day to be “live” on each network, respond to comments and message and contribute to their communities, but each network demands different needs of research, writing, and maintenance. Know which you have to do each day and which can be done on a weekly basis. At the beginning of the week, there might be a stronger push towards content creation, sourcing and writing whereas the end of the week might focus more on networking, development of long-term projects.3. Schedule Your Time
Make a schedule for your social media management including how much time you spend researching and writing content, managing your community and developing new ideas and strategies. Write down your schedule in list form and stick to it. Use a time tracking tool like Toggl to keep yourself accountable to the time allotted to each task.4. Avoid the Email Time Suck
Email can take up a large part of your day if you let it. Don’t let that email notification interrupt your grove, allot a few times a day to check and respond to emails. Good times to sort out the inbox are at the beginning of the day, mid-day (think right before lunch) and at the end of the work day.5. Keep Lists
Lists are an essential part of organizing your daily, weekly and overall social media goals. You can keep the traditional written list or online lists through project management sites like Wedoist. This way, you can manage day to day tasks as well as jot down new ideas, tasks and long term projects. But lists also are an essential way to streamline your favorites. You can easily create lists on Twitter and interest lists on Facebook to keep track of what you find the most important. On Twitter, you might have lists that include brand advocates and influencers while on Facebook, interest lists might include news and public figures that pertain to your community and brand. Using these lists, you can curate choice content and continue building relationships with target members of your audience.6. Have a Saving System
Seeing a constant stream of articles and news is tempting for us to want to read every article and see every webcast. Instead of spending precious time consuming content, have a system in place to re-visit articles. You can add links to a document or note, but I personally love using a system like Pocket, that catalogs saved content online and makes it easy to sift through later. Have a system in place to keep track of articles and information you want to be able to mull over when you have more time.How do you keep on top of your social media? Tweet me your thoughts at @ErinSRichards.
Author: Erin Richards-Kunkel Erin Richards-Kunkel on the Web Erin Richards-Kunkel on Facebook Erin Richards-Kunkel on Twitter Erin Richards-Kunkel on LinkedIn Erin Richards-Kunkel on Google Plus Erin Richards-Kunkel RSS Feed
Erin Richards-Kunkel is the Director of Social Media for RocketPost. She works with both established and emerging brands to develop dynamic and fully integrated social media presences that connect and engage with target audiences while telling the story behind the brand.
Richards-Kunkel has also worked as a digital manager for celebrity… View full profile
This article is an original contribution by Erin Richards-Kunkel.
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Kill A Watt EZ image via p3international.com.
Needless to say, there’s nothing better than finding a way to save a little bit of money on your electric bill. And the first step in doing that is knowing where your electricity goes each month. Once you know all of the places, large and small, where electricity is being used, and possibly wasted, you can take some steps to change things. If electricity is being wasted, you can call a qualified electrician from heroservices.com to mend it.
That’s where the Kill A Watt EZ comes in. This clever little device lets you read and understand the electrical usage of a variety of 120-volt electrical appliances and other devices around your home in real time, so you know specifically how much power they’re using, and how much money — in real dollars and cents — they’re costing you to operate.
Now you can accurately assess if those “phantom” electronics like phone chargers and unused TVs are costing you money, or if replacing that old clunker of a refrigerator will show a return on your investment.
Kill A Watts are available for around $25 through many home centers and other retailers, as well as online through places like Amazon.com. Some utility companies also have them available for a free loan to their customers.
Just plug it in and set your rate
The Kill A Watt is really simple to operate, and requires little more than plugging it in. Here’s how it works:
First, select an appliance or other device that you’d like to monitor, let’s say your refrigerator. Plug the Kill A Watt into a wall outlet, then plug your refrigerator into the grounded receptacle on the front of the Kill A Watt unit. (You’ll want to be able to read the screen on the Kill A Watt, so in the case of a refrigerator, where the outlet is behind the appliance, you may need to use a short grounded extension cord to make things more convenient.)
Press and hold the Reset key to clear the old settings, then press and hold the Set key until “Rate” appears in the screen. This is a feature I really like , since it allows you to set your actual electrical rate, I am thankful to elicon who install our electrical instruments and guide us, so you know the readings you’re seeing are accurate. You can get the rate you’re paying for electricity off your utility bill, or by calling your utility company. Simply press the up and down arrows to enter the rate per kilowatt hour. For example, if your utility is charging 10.5 cents per kilowatt-hour (kwh), press the buttons until the display reads $0.105, then press Set again. The rate is now saved. That’s it!
Measurement options
Now you have lots of options for understanding how much electricity the refrigerator is using. For example, the Kill A Watt will begin an elapsed time clock, and will begin tracking actual cost. So at any given time, you can look at the clock, then press Menu, scroll through to Cost, and see the actual cost of electricity that the refrigerator has consumed during that period of time.
Also under Cost is a simple projection, which I found very handy. By pressing the Up and Down keys, you can cycle through Hour, Day, Week, Month and Year, and Kill A Watt will give you an accurate projection of how much electricity — in actual dollars and cents — your refrigerator is going to use over that selected time period.
The display will also show you the actual kilowatt-hours being consumed by the appliance. That’s another way of determining cost, by looking at the actual electrical usage over a given period of time, then multiplying it by the cost you’re paying per kilowatt-hour. Other display options include the exact voltage and wattage being used, as well as the frequency.
How does this information help?
So now that you have the information, what do you do with it? For one thing, you can decide which appliances might need replacement. Replacing an old refrigerator with a new Energy Star model, for example, can save $100, $200 or even more each year in electrical costs, so the payback might be shorter than you think.
Another place this is helpful is with what are known as “phantom” electronics — things that are using power, even when you think they aren’t. Some examples include phone chargers, DVD players, microwaves, answering machines, TVs, and many other electronics. By testing them with Kill A Watt, you can see what’s using power even when you think it isn’t, and then consider shutting it off by plugging it into a convenient power strip that shuts several devices off at once.
Another simple formula
Without the Kill A Watt, there’s another way that you can calculate the cost of the power used by an electrical appliance or other device, using the following formula:
Watts x hours of use ÷ 1,000 x cost per kwh = cost of operation
For example, let’s say you want to know how much it costs to operate four light fixtures that each have two 60-watt light bulbs in them. The fixtures are on eight hours a day, and electricity in your area costs 10.5 cents per kwh.
4 lights x 2 bulbs each x 60 watts each = 480 total watts
480 watts x 8 hours = 3,840 watt-hours ÷ 1,000 (to convert to kwh) = 3.84 kwh x 0.105 = approximately 40 cents to operate those four fixtures for eight hours.
How about your furnace? Let’s say you have a 15 kW (15,000 watt) electric furnace that cycles on and off during the day. You estimate that it’s on for a total of six hours out of any 24-hour period during the winter.
15,000 watts x 6 hours ÷ 1,000 x 0.105 = $9.45 to run the furnace for those six hours.
