Beacon Technology is the next big thing for local Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The Big technology companies including Google and Facebook have already implemented beacon technology and are actively seeking early adoption of beacons on the store-level.

The definition of a beacon is a physical light or other visible object serving as a signal or guide. Beacon Technology operates the same. Beacons are physical devices that operate based on proximity. All beacons use a low-energy Bluetooth signal to operate and are a cloud platform device. Some frequently used names are Proximity Beacon (PB) and Bluetooth Low Energy Beacon (LE).

Beacons are used to encourage customer engagement, send quick knowledge, and drive sales. Beacons can send push notifications to people within a certain distance of the device. Brick and mortar stores can send specials or savings to in-store customers to encourage purchases or give them helpful business information that solidifies trust. Public locations like bus stops can provide information that is publicly accessible and will help people get information instantly, such as what time the next bus is stopping there. They can also encourage user-generated content. Users are encouraged to add images of your business and leave an online review of your business.

Beacons are a new way to ensure customers are getting accurate, up to date information when they want it. It is also a way to reach people when they are most engaged, or conversely if they are in your business but may still be price comparing on their phone. Beacons can be an excellent way to seal the deal or promote a “why you should buy” message.

Google beacons allow businesses to promote a URL, which allows customer interaction with Google’s Physical Web product. Physical Web is a platform that finally acknowledges consumer behavior in real-life. Physical Web allows you to interact with what’s around you – interact with inanimate objects or choose web pages related to your surroundings.

A Bluetooth signal will initiate information transfer when a customer is within a certain radius of a beacon. One important thing to note is that beacons are ONE-WAY information transmitters, therefore they are not be collecting data or violating any privacy laws. Instead of taking information from your phone or you personally, beacons are only submitting information to the user. The Facebook beacon will display information when a user is using the Facebook app within the beacon range. Facebook will show Place Tips, a welcome note, and photo. The Facebook beacon will also encourage users to like the business page and check-in to the business. Being a social app in nature, it will also display recommendation information from a user’s Facebook friends.

For now, the Facebook beacon is free. There are several companies that offer beacons for a price such as the Google-compatible beacons average $25 per device.

Both Google and Facebook beacons will come already activated right out of the box. You simply have to place them in a fixed location, preferably a doorway. Some beacons also work by USB power instead of an internal battery – these must be plugged into a computer at all times.

Beacons may begin to collect more accurate data on key business factors like the busiest time of day and the average foot traffic of each location. While these are relatively simple devices, they may be able to track the aggregate number of impressions served over a certain timeline and report back on them. While those statements are just a theory, one thing is for certain: beacons will be an effective way to engage with the formerly disengaged customer who is more focused on their phone than the world around them.

From an advertiser perspective, beacons may help assist with the Store Visits objective. The current challenges with Store Visit measurement is primarily geographical; currently only large, freestanding stores like Whole Foods and Target have effective store visit capability and measurement. Anonymous solutions like beacons may bridge the gap for the large percentage of business that is currently unable to measure in-store success and cross-attribution from their digital campaigns.

For more information go to https://www.clickherepublishing.com/local-seo-beacons/

Facebook has introduced a new template for business manager pages effective August 22nd 2018.

The new template will allow people to easily connect with your business. You can choose your business’ new template based on your business goals and priorities. For example, if your business is a restaurant there are templates available that prioritizes restaurant goals. If you choose a template for businesses, sales goals are prioritized. Template options consist of services, venues, movies, nonprofit, politicians, and the list goes on. Each template is prioritized to show what your viewers and/or customers find most important.

The new template allows you to customize how your page layout appears to users. You can easily rearrange sidebar tabs prioritizing what you think is most important to users and your business, hopefully improving conversion rate.

Another new twist is that Ratings are now Recommendations. While it is still under the “Review” section, you can no longer rate a business on 1-5 star scale. When customers want to write a review, they can choose to recommend or not recommend your page.

Recommendations are powerful endorsements. 2 in 3 Facebook users visit the page of a local business at least once a week. 1 in 3 people on Facebook use the platform to look for recommendations and reviews. When customers publicly recommend you in a group or to their friends, it appears on your page for all to see. Therefore, recommendations are essential to your business in order to drive more sales and to, obtain a positive reputation.

Any Facebook user can easily report content that you believe is unfair, fraud, spam or paid for. This feature will benefit your business by keeping your businesses reputation true.

Customers can now easily share important details through tags and photos. In order to leave a recommendation, locate the recommendations on the left side of a page. Click YES to recommend or NO to not recommend. Write your custom recommendation or you can choose from auto tags (friendly staff, slow service, etc.)

Facebook is testing a new rating and recommendation system. Facebook currently uses a scale of 1-5 stars as an overall rating for your business. A new system is currently being tested to replace the 5-star scale with a rating scale from 1-10. Sentiments within reviews as well as recommendations and response times to private messages will be considered when calculating the overall rating of a business.

We’ll keep you posted as things continue to change within the FB platform.

Check out this fascinating blog from The Alliance of Nonprofit Mailers.

Any discussion of the future of the United States Postal Service, and the way it should be regulated, must focus on an important reality. The reality is that 90 percent of USPS revenue is paid by organizations and businesses, and 80 percent of Postal Service cost goes to employees.

Read the entire blog here

The Facebook timeline is dictated by a set of algorithms used to   asses how interested an individual FB account user is with a posted story.

This is based on three steps of logic:

• Inventory: Stories you have not seen from your friends and the pages that you follow.
• Signals: Information FB has available to make informed decisions about your likes such as:
  • Age of post
  • Who posted the story
  • How fast is your internet speed when accessed
  • Type of phone or electronic device you are using
  • What kind of content may be problematic to you
    • Spam
    • Click Bait
    • False News
  • Predictions: FB determines how likely you are to comment, share, hide or report each story.

Facebook collects a few dozen predictions then weight them.  After, they roll them up into a relevancy score and present posts to your timeline based on those scores.

The stories in your newsfeed are likely to by chronological because the age of a story is one of the determining signals.  However, it is not strictly so.

Partner Categories, within the Facebook advertising world, are the new walking dead and will be eliminated from the platform on August 15, 2018.

Partner Categories are some of the demographics available when creating targeted audiences for FB Ads.  These demographics are derived from third-party data.  The third-party partners are the “big guns” which include Acxiom, Epsilon, Experian, Oracle Data Cloud, and Quantium; the data giants of today.  They help provide game-changing personal information within the paid ads stage such as household income, parents with children [pick the age], or what kind of car your audience drives.  

Depending on the targeting options you select, soon  you won’t see leading indicators such as audience size and potential reach.

We’ll keep you posted on how this change affects your paid advertising on Instagram and Facebook as it unfolds.

Up until 2015, the Twitter timeline displayed tweets in reverse-chronological order.

Attempting to improve the Twitter experience, Twitter has gradually introduced changes to how they show tweets on your timeline.

Keep in mind that like all other popular social media platforms, the algorithm is in a constant state of change.  As the timeline algorithm changes have helped to increase their key metrics, you can count on Twitter to continue to tweak its algorithms on (at least) a weekly basis.  It also seems highly unlikely that Twitter will go the same path as Facebook and create a 100% algorithmic timeline as Twitter CEO (Jack Dorsey) says that the platform will remain “Live and Real-Time”.

The Twitter timeline consists of three steps:

1. Ranked Tweets
2. “In Case You Missed It” Tweets
3. Reverse Chronological Order Tweets

The algorithm studies the tweets from accounts you follow and gives each of them a relevance score based on several factors such as:

• The tweet: Factors that include recency, presence of images or video, and engagement such as retweets, clicks, favorites, and time spent reading a tweet are elements used for ranking
• The author: Past interactions with a tweet’s author, the strength of your connection to them, and the origin of your relationship are also factors in the ranking recipe
• The User: How often and how heavily you use twitter, and the tweets you engage with are part of the ranking equation as well

Twitter places the tweets it has determined to be of interest to you in the first two buckets; Ranked Tweets and “In Case You Missed It“ followed by real-time, reverse chronologically ordered tweets.

Twitter’s intent is to give you access to the best tweets for you at a first glance before delving into the lengthier time-ordered sections.

According to a blog published by the Alliance of Nonprofit Mailers in June, they are becoming more optimistic that the Postal Rate Commission’s (PRC) Notice of Proposed Rulemaking issued earlier in the year is not likely to happen in January as so many of us feared.

There is a good deal of confidence that the PRC will not act on the 10-year regulatory review recommendations until after the President’s Task Force on the USPS system finishes its report due on August 10, 2018. The Task Force has received an outpouring of suggestions and the PRC is faced with milling through pages of reply comments received back in March, most denouncing their proposal.

The scheduled January postal rate increase depends on an expedited PRC decision if it is going to include rates above the CPI cap currently in place. A USPS price change also depends on Senate Confirmation of at least one Governor too, which is unlikely to quickly happen.

We’ll keep you abreast as this important ruling unfolds.

There are four ways for your followers to see posts generated by your company page:

1. “See First” Setting
2. Your audience does a search for your page
3. Via callouts and hashtags
4. Pay FB to place posts on people’s Newsfeed.

The “See First” setting is simple to do.  You turn on this feature for each page and it allows you to see up to 5 posts a day on your Newsfeed.  Facebook doesn’t seem to be promoting this option.

Every page has loyal followers (often friends and family) who will search for your company page directly in order to see and read posts.  Unfortunately, the majority of followers won’t.

Using callouts and hastags will get a post placed on more Newsfeeds.  However, it’s difficult to include those with every post which leaves you with paying Facebook to place your posts on people’s Newsfeeds.

The Ads platform is changing every day as well. Facebook’s marketing glossary continues to expand as do the features. Terms like LTV (Lifetime Value-which is the overall revenue a business generates from an average user throughout their time using the app); add to a growing list acronyms specific to advertising on the platform.

New features released this month alone include the Info & Ads Feature that allows all users to view every ad a page is running at that moment, even if the user doesn’t Like/Follow the page or is a member of the targeted audience. Also, you can cross-post (single image posts only) onto an Instagram account from Facebook. Companies like HootSuite and Buffer are loosing their service values by the day.

Old and reliable features are going away just as fast. Facing elimination as of August 15th is Partner Categories. They are some of the demographics available when creating targeted audiences. These demographics are derived from third-party data.  The third-party partners are the “big guns” which include Acxiom, Epsilon, Experian, Oracle Data Cloud, and Quantium; the data giants of today.  They help provide game-changing personal information within the paid ads stage such as household income, parents with children [pick the age], or what kind of car your audience drives.

Depending on the targeting options you select, soon  you won’t see leading indicators such as audience size and potential reach either.

We’ll keep you posted as things continue to evolve.

People are ignoring privacy emails from CNBC.

One of the most important USPS innovations was the Centralized Account Payment System (CAPS). Prior to CAPS, most mailers had to pay for postage via check into trust accounts associated with each local mailing permit they established, and in advance of mailings. The CAPS system allowed for customers to cover all of their payments to USPS through one centralized account funded with electronic funds transfers.

The most advanced feature of CAPS was enabling mailers to have their own bank accounts debited by the USPS with the Automated Clearinghouse (ACH), after the mail was entered. This enabled “just in time payment” that brought USPS customer service more in line with the business world. It also reduced costs on both the customer and USPS sides, as it replaced thousands of paper checks with ACH transfers.

Today the USPS has given CAPS a makeover, (now known as Enterprise Payment System (EPS)). EPS will keep the core enhancements of CAPS that are now taken for granted and add more functionality and ease of use, according to a recent Postal announcement.

As of April 1, 2019, the USPS will retire CAPS.  After launching the new EPS payment processing system which supports multiple payment options, including mobile check deposit, offers more reporting features, and allows management of multiple USPS business functions under one account.

Eligible Products and Services include First-Class Mail®, Letters, Cards, and Flats, Priority Mail, First-Class Package Service, USPS Marketing Mail™, Letters, Flats, and Parcels, Parcel Select®, Media Mail®, Library Mail, Bound Printed Matter, Periodicals, International Products, Business Reply Mail (BRM), and Every Door Direct Mail (EDDM®), submitted via hard copy, eDoc (Mail.dat/Mail.XML), Postal Wizard or the Intelligent Mail® small business (IMsb) Tool, PO Box, Caller & Reserve Services (EPOBOL), and Address Quality Products (AEC, AECII and ACS™).

Products not currently supported include Electronic Verification System (eVS®), Parcel Return Service (PRS), PC Postage®, Scan Based Payment (SBP), Merchandise Return Service (MRS), Official Mail Accounting System (OMAS), Premium Forwarding Service Commercial (PFSC™), Share Mail®, and Intelligent Mail barcode Accounting (IMbA). Customers utilizing these products will be continue to be supported through CAPS.

Effective September 1, 2018, new payment accounts must be established through EPS. Effective April 1, 2019, eligible CAPS accounts must be migrated to EPS, although customers are encouraged to migrate now.

Mail Entry and Business Mailer Support is hosting a series of informational sessions on EPS and the migration process:

o When: Occurs every Tuesday 1:00 PM to 2:00 PM EST

o Webex: https://uspsmeetings.webex.com/uspsmeetings/j.php?MTID=mb2fa637535b3d99a3c91879db494ff8f

o Call-in toll-free number (US): 1-855-860-7461

 Conference Code: 358 251 5082

For more information:

Visit PostalPro Enterprise Payment System Page: https://postalpro.usps.com/eps
For more EPS benefits and how to create an EPS account review the Enterprise Payment System Account Creation Fact Sheet: https://postalpro.usps.com/EPS/MigrationFactSheet
To sign-up today contact:

Your local Business Mail Entry Unit (BMEU): https://ribbs.usps.gov/locators/find-bme.cfm
PostalOne! Helpdesk
o Call: 1-800-522-9085

o Email: Postalone@usps.gov