Here at Beacon, we strive to make our clients and prospective clients feel like we are here to help. We want everyone to feel like we are all part of the same team and we all are working towards the same goal. We know that Web Design, Search Engine Optimization, and Web Development are areas of expertise that might generate a lot of questions for anyone not familiar in them and because of this we want to open up a line of communication for YOU to ask US questions. So if there is something you don’t understand or want better clarity about, now’s your chance to ask us!

To Enter a Question:

1. Send us a tweet using @BeaconTec
2. Make sure to include #AskBT in your tweet. This way everyone can see the questions being asked.

Answered Question: 

Answers to more in depth questions will be posted on the blog. Some answers might be in the form of a video while others are written out.  Any simple answers to questions will be posted on twitter. For answers posted on the blog, a tweet will be sent out notifying participants that a question has been answered.

Rules and Regulations:

*Beacon reserves the right to only answer questions we feel appropriate for the subject matters listed above.

*Profanity and slander are prohibited.

*Participants can submit more than 1 question but Beacon cannot guarantee that each question will be answered.

Who loves Twitter and Facebook? We do!

If you aren’t already following us on twitter then check us out @beacontec! If you are, then talk to us! We love chatting with others;  whether its sharing information or just getting feedback!  We’ve met some really great tweeps and look forward to meeting and talking with many more!

Check us out on Facebook too!

So don’t wait any longer, look us up and join the conversation!

Everyone loves social media and majority of us have some type of SM account. Of course, not everyone uses it for the same reasons. An individual might have a Twitter and Facebook page just to keep up with family and friends whereas; a business uses them to promote the brand. No matter what your reason for SM, it’s always good to know your standing in the social media world. So I’ve put together a list of my Top 5 SM tools I use:

                     1.   Facebook Grader – This measures the reach and authority of your FB page.

                     2.   Edgerank Checker – a great site to measure your EdgeRank for facebook.

                     3.   Twitter Grader – this measures the power, authority, and reach of a twitter account.

                      4.  Klout – this measures your authority and reach on Twitter, Facebook, Foursquares, YouTube, and LinkedIn and recently started doing “+K” where other users can give you more of an influence on certain topics. You can also see how you compare to other users on twitter as well.

                       5.  Social Mention – A real time analysis of your social status. It also offers great information on your strength, keywords, user, and a lot more.

Make sure to check out our Twitter & Facebook accounts to see what we're buzzing about!

@beacontec & https://www.facebook.com/beacontechnologies

Lots of <3,

Ashley

Eight weeks down, two more to go.  The past two months have really gone by quickly.  I spent some time today reflecting back and what all I have done and learned so far here at Beacon.  I’ve learned a lot, but I realize that there is still a lot I don’t know.  Since this week was the start of a new month, I spent a lot of time this week working on transitioning the accounts I was working on to other members of the WMS team.  This involved some meeting time and talking about what I had been doing, what I planned to do, and what steps could come next.  The other major thing I did this week was to compile monthly reports for the clients I had been covering.  Like I mentioned a few weeks back, that’s not the most glamorous task but it’s really not so bad.  I found it very rewarding to see growth in the clients I covered and to see things I had done start to show results.

The other big thing I did this week was to sit down and map out a final two week plan to help market Beacon itself.  I’m excited to be getting into this since my background from undergrad is marketing.  Some of the things I am going to be doing involve PPC campaigns, setting up various tracking measures, creating possible promotions, and a few other ideas.  This will be fun.

On a side note, I have been doing a lot of work with social media for several clients as well as for Beacon, and the more involved I get, the more I learn.  I’ve always been comfortable with Facebook, but I never really have had much exposure to outlets such as blogs, Twitter, and Foursquare.  That has changed during my time at Beacon.  I’ve learned how to utilize various outlets to accomplish different tasks.  For instance, I’ve learned that using Twitter can be very valuable for interacting with customers and is a great tool for promotional contests.  Another thing I learned is that Foursquare, which is a location based check-in service, is great for driving foot traffic into a business.  The way that is done is by first setting a location for the business within Foursquare.  Then you can set up options where special offers will pop up on someone’s cell phone if they are running the Foursquare app and they are within a specified geographical area of your business’s location.

The final thing I want to talk about relates to social media as well.  The “new kid on the block” is Google+.  I was able to get an invite to join Google+ today.  For those who are unfamiliar with Google+, it basically is a social media outlet similar to Facebook.  There are subtle differences between the two that I have observed, but overall it seems to be more or less the same.  The concept is almost the same as Facebook, and the only real differences at the moment are that Google+ calls features by different names than they are called within Facebook.  I’m not entirely sure if it’s something I’ll stay with but I’m willing to give it the “old college try.”

This week was a fun week.  I got the opportunity to learn some things that I was not familiar with and then got to put what I learned into practice.  I learned how to create SEO landing pages.  Basically these pages serve the purpose of helping a website rank for keywords that are important to the website.  This is turn helps the page to appear higher in search results.  Making and editing these pages is not the most fun task, but it is a good skill to have.  I think I spent probably around four hours learning how to do this and then actually working on them.  All-in-all, I would say it was a good experience.  I learned some information on effectively creating title tags, meta descriptions, and page content.  These are skills that will help me even outside of SEO work.  I had to think about getting my message across in a short message and efficiently say what I am trying to say in that short message.  This is a valuable skill to have.

Another thing I did this week was to learn a lot about Twitter and how to utilize it.  One of the clients I am working with is focusing a lot on social media and trying to increase its presence and better communicate with whom it is connected.  One of the things fun things with this client is that I am getting to learn more about Twitter and then share that information as well as help manage the Twitter account.  Some of the things I’ve been working on are optimizing whom the client follows as well as helping with communicating to the client’s followers.  I have been looking over some of the tweets that the client sees and retweeting them to the client’s followers as well as a few other related tasks.

Aside from that, there were the usual meetings/brainstorming sessions.  These are great because I get to learn more about SEO and different methods and tools.  Another thing I did this week was start to conceptualize a layout for a monthly newsletter for a client.  I really like to do things like that because it allows me to be more creative.  I don’t really have great drawing talent so it looks pretty rough on the piece of notebook paper that I hashed it out on, but it gets the job done.  I guess the next step is to practice using Photoshop to work on my graphic editing skills and also using Dreamweaver to compile the newsletter since it will be sent out in HTML.

As the conductor of our Social Media Transit System, I wanted to provide some quick feedback to help keep your wheels in motion.  It’s a big world out there and if you try to be everywhere at once, you will get burned out before you ever get noticed.  Listed below are some tips to help keep you “on track.”

Even if you aren’t ready to post your company photos on Flickr, go ahead and claim all of the user-names you prefer for all the social networking sites (Twitter, Facebook, Linked in, YouTube, etc.).   A fantastic website to use to do this all at once is Knowem.  Once you have these profiles at least enter a bit of data with links going to your site.  Most social networking sites have great PR, so use that to your benefit.  Also, by having lots of profiles you will automatically begin to stack the search result shelves when users conduct branded searches.

With the little bit of time you can provide each week, make sure you “work smart and not hard.”  Set up a social media desktop application such as Hootsuite or Tweetdeck to schedule posts, search for followers, and spy on your competition.

Take a bit of time each week to try to increase your following.  There is no point posting if no one is listening.  If you want to get followers on Twitter, follow people for the law of reciprocation.  If you want to get likes on Facebook, join groups and spread the word.

Another tip for increasing your following is to offer exclusive incentives.  People aren’t going to just jump aboard without a reason.  If you don’t have the budget to offer a promotion, or you are new to the market altogether, try to find someone big and influential and request them to tell their people about you. When it comes to posting, engagement is what brings the credibly up on your profile, so make sure to post or tweet something you know your following will want to share or comment on

Use social media to follow your competition.  Learn what are they doing to see what works and what doesn’t and then proactively leave them in your wake.  Not sure what your audience would want?  Ask them with poll questions, which in turn will increase your levels of engagement.

Remember, the biggest investment in social media is your own personal time.  By doing a little work every day, you can stay active without sacrificing other important elements to your marketing success.

Cascade Server CMS has built in tools, called Connectors. These connectors allow Cascade Server to connect directly to 3rd-party applications. Currently, there are two Connectors available to choose from, WordPress and Twitter. Once a Connector is setup correctly, any page you publish using Cascade can automatically be posted to your twitter or blog. This can reduce the hassle if you manage your Twitter, WordPress blog, and website content separately. Both of the Connectors are easy to setup.

To setup a new WordPress Connector:

1. Navigate to Connectors in the Site Administration area
2. Click “Create Connector“
3. Choose “WordPress” as the Connector type
4. Click “Submit“
5. Fill in the WordPress Connector’s name, parent folder, and URL (pointing to the WordPress instance to be used)
6. Fill in the Username and Password for your WordPress account.
7. Fill in the Content Type (under “Content Types” tab). Note: Each Content Type determines which Page Configuration is published to the WordPress post.  The Content Type also maps Metadata fields to Categories and Tags for the post
8. Click “Submit” to save your WordPress Connector.
9. You need to verify that the connection with WordPress is successful. Click on the “View” tab, and click the “Verify” link.

To setup a new Twitter Connector:

1. Navigate to Connectors in the Site Administration area
2. Click “Create Connector”
3. Choose “Twitter” as the Connector type
4. Click “Submit”
5. Fill in the Twitter Connector’s name, parent container, destination (The Destination to which a Page must be published in order for a tweet to be generated)
6. Fill in the Content Type (under “Content Types” tab).
7. Under “Parameters” tab, fill in the Hashtags (eg. #BeaconBlog) or Prefix that will be published with each tweet.
8. Click “Submit” and save your Twitter Connector
9. Click on “Click here to allow and Verify again.”
10. A new window will open up, type your Username and Password and click “Allow”.
11. Close that window, and go back to your Cascade Server Connector window. Click “Verify” again and it will be all set.
12. You need to verify that the connection with Twitter is successful. Click on the “View” tab, and click the “Verify” link.

If you need further help, check out Hannon Hill’s Knowledge Base at: http://www.hannonhill.com/kb/Connectors/ OR leave a comment below.

Blogging is considered easy, right? Everyone has access to tools to communicate original ideas and topics that catch our interest as blog posts. Now that blogging has been around for a while, what’s next? Normally, a blog post includes a topic of interest, some pros and cons, an image or two and some links. What is the next step one might wonder?
Well, Twitter definitely changed the game when they brought us “micro-blogging”. Your “post” on any topic must be contained in 140 characters or less — brief text and maybe a link. As we iterate blog best practices, consider what “nano-blogs” may look like. I can see a temptation to skip the content and just share links — maybe a brief headline with the link.

This already exists today to some degree with sites like ping.fm that broadcasts your “posts” to multiple sites. I like that ability to aggregate accounts, post to one site and move on. Other services that allow us to repost such as “Add This” or “Share This” provide a quick way to share content. Other sites have the various share icons at the bottom of the page. As we continue to progress forward, will using any of this count as a blog post?

Could the next blog progression involve a trail of the sites I liked or viewed for more than 5 minutes? The time duration can be argued, and I will leave the privacy issues aside for now. Point is how does it get easier to indicate what catches my attention that I want you to be aware of?

What would make blogging easier for you? What do you think are the key factors that will drive blogging to progress even further? Is there a list of requirements or a common view on new features somewhere?

The relationship between social media and search is very real and is not going away.  It is now helping to fuel the search engines’ fire to provide us with the best results and does so by using social media data as cues to better match what the search engines think we are looking for in the location where we can best engage with the information we require.

Search engines are achieving this goal by integrating social popularity in their organic search algorithms.  This popularity section seems presently to be the mix of social media relevancy and click-through rate.  Such has been more and more noticeable with Google’s expansion of Twitter feeds in their results.  In fact, even if you delete all of your tweets and your account, your tweets will still exist because Google assigns a number to every tweet.  (Just thought I would throw that tidbit of info out for everyone that assumes hitting “delete” is the end to unintelligent late-night posts).

Bing has also been utilizing Facebook’s Like buttons in their organic search results.  Their current factors of influence as to the relevance of the social mediums to use are the number of followers, fans, and brand names/keywords passed around the social networks.

This information is important! Search engines are no longer just regurgitating results; they are making assumptions from your Internet usage and applying your preferred means of obtaining data to push information you search back to you.  They are actually listening to their customers and providing them with what they really want, not just what has the best PR due to keyword density, URL age, etc.

It has been necessary for the search engines to keep up with all of these social networks that now take up more chunks of users’ time online, especially when you look at Twitter, who now has a real time search box.  While results are not always perfect, they are still improving every day, and if people continue to spend more time on social networks, the search engines must keep up.

No matter how popular social networks continue to gain strength and popularity, they will never prevent the need for search.  Seventy percent of online customers still find the sites from which they make purchases through search, but they also now spend a quarter of their time online in social media networks.

Trends will always be changing on the web, but have no fear, for the folks at Beacon will continue to be your guide in these new unchartered territories.

Social Media… It seems to be one of the buzz words that online marketers love to throw around.   What does it really mean and is it really important for your business?   I started out in the business in SEO several years ago before the phrase “social media” really existed and my goals were about getting more qualified visitors to a website where they would interact with the content.

Before there were social media giants like Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter people would generally start their web experience at a search engine.   These served as the best portal to access information online so people “congregated” there.   What these new social media websites provide is another portal to the web where users interact with networks of people they know.    Several aspects of our daily lives are being digitally organized so we interact with the web in such a way that it consistently provides information that is more relevant to our daily lives than when we just search for a specific piece of information.