Since the beginning of the twenty first century, social media has become an essential tool for businesses of nearly every type and every size. Social media allows businesses to network with others, advertise to potential customers, communicate with fans, share information, and complete many other important tasks.

Which Social Media Platforms Should Your Business Use?

Depending on multiple factors, you will have to decide which specific social media platforms your business would like to utilize. The demographics of your audience and your social media goals will both have an effect on the platforms that you choose to use and the ways that you choose to use them. If you want to create an in depth online presence, it is often useful to hire a professional social media manager.

Facebook

Facebook has specific business tools that are designed to help businesses target their ideal customers and attract them through paid advertisement. These tools can be highly effective but it is important to understand that there is a financial cost associated with using them.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is specifically designated as a professional platform so it is especially important for businesses to establish a presence on it. This platform can be useful if you are hiring at your business or if you want to network with other businesses in regards to partnerships, events, investments, or other mutual tasks.

Instagram

Instagram is a great app because it allows you to share photo content with fans of your business, customers of your business, and/ or clients. Instagram also has excellent tools for sharing video and live video. Live video can be a great way to personalize your business social media accounts.

Tik Tok

Tik Tok is one of the newer social media platforms but it is extremely popular, especially among younger generations. If you are targeting a younger demographic, it is essential to have a presence on this app. Tik Tok is also a great way to share short video content related to your business.

Youtube

If you are looking to share more in-depth video content, YouTube can be a great tool. YouTube allows you to share longer videos that can be permanently linked for sharing on other social media platforms as well.

Pinterest

Pinterest boards assemble together links, photo content, video content, and other forms of content to establish social mood boards. Businesses in the clothing industry, baby industry, wedding industry, and food industry may especially find this app to be useful.

Twitter

Twitter is one of the most informal apps that businesses use to establish an online presence. Businesses often establish a more trendy, fun, and youthful presence on this app. It is also extremely popular for interaction between businesses, between businesses and fans, and between businesses and celebrities.

Conclusions on Social Media for Business

No matter which social media platforms your business chooses to use, it is important to pay attention to the type of presence that you create. Be professional but also personal and friendly on social media accounts for your businesses. It can be very helpful to hire professional assistance when doing this. Replying to comments and messages helps as well.

Digital analytics & SEO services in Austin TX covers the collection, analysis, visualization, and interpretation of real time, online data describing user behavior on web sites, mobile apps, and social media platforms. An important part of online intelligence, digital analytics allows business owners and brands to know how their websites and apps are being viewed and found by visitors. This information can be used to improve your current strategies, or to create new ones.

How Google Analytics Works

Google Analytics is an open source website monitoring tool that provides many different statistics. The most important ones are the number of visitors and the number of people who actually clicked through to the sales page or the other pages of your site. When people to your site to view a particular page, this JavaScript snippet references a special JavaScript file that then runs the tracking process for Analytics on your site.

To make use of Google’s advanced analytics features, you should get the latest version from Google. The most commonly used Google Analytics tracking features are the Google Analytics pop up and the Google analytics code. With the Google Analytics code, you can set the appearance of your site on your Google Analytics account, and you can also set up statistics that show the behavior of your visitors. However, you should make sure that the code does not cause your system to crash or that you need to be a member of the program to see the report. There are other reporting options available for you, but these two are the most popular. You can also use Google Search Console to get details about clicks or impressions on your web pages, and then you can use the Google XML Sitemap to find out more information about the source of traffic to your site. Another option you may want to consider is getting a paid Google Analytics account to get you all the information you need.

How to Set Up Google Analytics

Before you start setting up your site, make sure you have a basic understanding of the Google analytics application. There are many different aspects to this tool that you need to be familiar with. It is important that you learn how to set up Google Analytics in order to get the best results out of your online campaign.

Google Tag manager will set up Google Analytics. You will want set up Universal Analytics (also called Google Webmaster Tools) through Google Tag manager. This will help Google Analytics record all web traffic on your site. There is also an advanced reporting option on the Google webmaster tools that can help you track more than just website traffic. The advanced reporting option allows you to send emails to your clients and visitors if you like, and other advanced features like importing statistics from other sites into your own website is also available. This feature allows you to customize Google analytics in order to suit your own website needs and desires. This is a great feature that makes it easy to keep your site up and running.

After you have finished setting up your site and your Google analytics, it is time to put it all to use. The next step in the setup process will be to install Google Analytics. Once you have installed the software, you can track your website’s performance and use the webmaster tools to see where the traffic is coming in comes from.

If you’re looking for search engine optimizations experts in San Marcos & Austin Texas, consider contacting tekRESCUE today!

For many people interested in having a mobile app developed, one of their main goals is to reach the widest audience possible and have the biggest impact with their app. This impact might be different for others depending on their type of business. For example, a business app might be to provide coupons or access member plans, while a service or utility app might seek to provide a service in the app itself and provide utility directly; the goal itself is still to reach the widest number of people in regards to your business. If you are developing your app for one specific platform, you might be limiting the reach that your app can have. Developing an app with cross platform in mind can have the bonus of allowing your app to be used as a web app as well as a native phone app.

One for All

One benefit of working in a cross-platform development environment is that it allows you to reuse your code base, meaning that you can save time while developing the app. Because Android, web, and iOS normally use different programming languages, you will end up needing to develop every app from start each time you create for a new platform. The only thing that will be shared between platforms is the graphics and content that you use, but not the code base, meaning instead of building 1 app, you are really developing 2 or 3 different apps altogether. Reusing code means cutting down the time that you must spend slowly transforming each module into a whole other language. By cutting down the work you have to do, you can save time, resulting in quicker development time to get a beta app out, quicker to get feedback, quicker to implement changes, and quicker to ultimately get into the app store. When you are using a single script, you will save time and get your app out the door quicker.

Saving Costly Developers

This process of saving work and time also means that you are saving money. Since often time it is not the same developer that know both iOS programming (Cocoa language) and Android languages (Java), so to develop without developing cross-platform means that you need more than 1 developer to create your app. The fact that not every language has the same capability, something that might be easily done using one language, might be more difficult to do on another.

Rather than each app being different because it is built in a different language, you can have the same look between different platforms. Achieving this same look will not cost you development time, which also helps your brand maintain its design standards. The fact that it is uniform also means that when it comes time to push out updates, you will only have to develop the update one time, saving you both in development and in managing costs for the app.

A good internet connection is the backbone of efficiency, especially when getting things done relies on the internet. With the demand for faster internet growing, so are the technological advancements trying to meet this demand. People want to send messages to get responses instantly and conveniently. In the beginning, all connections were made through cables. You could only access the internet by connecting your PC to an Ethernet cable. Then came the wireless connections, WiFi, which makes it possible to connect and access the internet wirelessly. While WiFi had an overwhelming reception, it did not phase out the use of Ethernet. In this article, we compare and contrast WiFi and Ethernet in detail.

Ethernet Vs. Wi-Fi

WiFi is the most common type of internet connection. It was introduced in 1999 and connects devices without a physical connection. Ethernet connects devices using LAN. It was introduced in 1973 and allows transmission of data over a network.
When comparing WiFi and Ethernet, several factors stand out.

Speed

Ethernet is slightly faster as cables are connected directly to the machine. Wireless networks tend to be a bit slower. Ethernet connections can provide speeds of up to 1000Mbps while Wireless connections with a standard of 802.11g had a theoretical standing of a maximum of 54Mbps. With the latest WiFi standard, WiFi speeds are matching up to their competitors with speeds of up t 3200Mbps.
WiFi speed can also be affected by the number of users connected. Ethernet, on the other hand, is stable as each user is directly connected on their own.

Convenience

Ethernet connections tend to be more stable in comparison to WiFi connections. Ethernet connections usually deliver a consistent speed when downloading or streaming files.
WiFi signals can be affected by external environmental factors. You will quickly notice instability in your connection when you move the router even around your home. While you can stabilize this by identifying one spot with the best connection and sticking to it, it can be challenging to achieve the stability that you can get with Ethernet connections.
On the other hand, WiFi networks are convenient as you do not need a cable to connect to your device. With a password, you can access the internet even on smaller devices such as your phone. This is not possible with Ethernet cables.
There is also no need for multiple cables to allow individual access.

Security

Ethernet connections are generally more secure as any data sent over an Ethernet connection can only be accessed by devices that are physically connected to that network. This minimizes any chances of attacks, data loss, or hacking.
WiFi is an open network, and data is not safe in such networks. It would be best if you were sure that data is encrypted when sending data over an open network. It can even be a lot riskier to send data over a Public WiFi.

Other factors to consider:

• Latency-Latency is the speed with which traffic travels from one destination to another. Wireless connections(WiFi)can have delays as they are not as stable as wired connections(Ethernet).
• Portability-With a WiFi router, you can efficiently work from anywhere provided there is a signal. Ethernet connections will require you to set up near the cable.

Summary

Both WiFi and Ethernet have their strengths and weaknesses. Ultimately, your choice of whether to go wireless or wired will depend on your needs along with the practicality of the application.

Due to lockdown orders and social distancing efforts, many of us have had to start working from home in the past few weeks. For those who are used to an office environment and haven’t had to work remotely before, it can be a bit intimidating to make the switch to working remotely. How do you know what equipment you’ll need? If you live with others, how will you stay focused and not let your normal home life distract from your work?

While many of the specifics depend on your particular job, we wanted to offer some general tips that can help everyone get started with a productive and enjoyable at-home work environment. Check them out in the infographic below, or keep scrolling to read the tips in article form. We’re all in this together!

Get Situated

The first step is to set up your at-home workspace. This doesn’t mean you need to clear out an entire room to set up a new home office. All you really need is a distraction-free area that’s dedicated to work—try not to work in the same space that you use for recreation. Below are some tips for setting up your at-home workspace.

• Dedicate Some Space—Create a dedicated work space and keep it clean and free from distraction.
• Get Comfy—Set up an area that is comfortable, but not so comfy that you forget you need to work!
• Set the Tone—Depending on the type of work, set up a work/study music playlist that can play in the background.
• (Attempt to) Wrangle the Pets—Keep cats off your laptop if possible. If not possible, learn to type around them! (It’s an acquired skill.)

Gear Up

Once you’ve found a good workspace, the next step is to make sure you have everything you need to get your work done. This includes having a good internet connection, the right software, and plenty of drinks and snacks! Below are a few of the most important things to consider when gearing up to work from home.

• Check Your Internet Speed—It’s time to ditch the dial-up modem and throw it away along with those old shorts from junior high.
• Enter the Chat—Find a good team messaging app that can accommodate work discussion as well as leisurely chat among co-workers. Try not to spam too many emojis!
• Meet Virtually—Find a good video conference app to fill in for in-person work meetings. Just make sure your webcam doesn’t puck up anything embarrassing!
• Sustain Yourself—Be sure to have lots of snacks on hand, and stay hydrated (preferably with a drink that has a lid).

Find a Routine

As with most things in life, working from home will feel much more natural once you’ve established a routine. This of course doesn’t mean just blocking out 8 hours a day for nothing but work. Below are some things that you should include in your work routine to improve your mood and productivity.

• Move Your Body—Alternate between sitting and standing, and be sure to move around regularly to increase bloodflow.
• Get Some Air—Go outside for some fresh air and sun throughout the day. Think of it like a smoke break without the smoke.
• Take a Break—Be sure to take scheduled breaks in their entirety, and try your best not to think about work while on break!
• Communicate—Share your routine with other members of your household so they know when to leave you alone.

Stay Secure

Working remotely means sending and receiving a lot of data between your computer and the internet. Without the usual IT infrastructure of your office to help protect your data, good personal cybersecurity practices become more important than ever before. Below are a few tips to get you started on the road to a more secure at-home workspace.

• Up Your Password Game—Make sure your passwords are both strong and unique. Use a password manager (such as LastPass) to help your brain out.
• Add Another Layer—When possible, use 2-factor authentication to add an extra layer of protection to your online accounts.
• Stay Updated—Now would be a good time to finally invest in good antivirus software and make sure your operating system and apps are all on the latest version.
• Know Who to Call—Cybersecurity can be tricky even for the most knowledgeable of us. It’s always a good idea to have an IT company you can call to help you out if you’re ever in doubt!

It is clear that this is the modern age of technology. Look around, cell phones are no longer a rarity; it is to the point that everyone is now rocking a smart phone, even children! What a wonderful age to live in. Seriously, this is a coup for the modern-day CEO, business men, or women to capitalize on. Businesses can be at the fingertips of every potential client or customer, however there is one catch. It’s important to know how to make your website mobile friendly so that it becomes accessible to people across the globe. Unfortunately, not everyone is a computer whiz, but there is a viable solution that ANYONE can seek.

The Modern-Day Technology Consulting Company

One might wonder exactly what a technology consulting company does. Well to put simply, they can help you grow your business. They help the business augment the way they are using technology to create a better experience for their clients and customers. And it goes beyond helping adapt a website to make it mobile friendly, they can streamline business processes and even help reduce business expresses.

The Importance of Mobile Friendly Websites

One of the easiest and best ways to grow one’s business is the implementation of a mobile friendly version of their website. Mobile friendly websites optimize the speed at which clients can be reached. An easy to use mobile site that highlights necessary information, as well as products and services, can even help build credibility with your customer base.

Optimizing Mobile Friendly Websites

How aesthetically pleasing and simple it is for the customer to navigate your website is just one small piece of a bigger picture. First, there are different types of mobile websites. There are responsive sites, dynamic serving sites, and entirely separate sites. Apart from the type of site used when you adapt your website to its mobile friendly counterpart, another important aspect to know and understand is something called Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. SEO will help you get a higher rank on Google which will make it easier for potential new clients and customers to stumble upon your website. That can mean more money in your pocket.

The Conclusion

Creating a beautiful, mobile friendly counterpart to your website, that is also a breeze to navigate, will take your business to the next level. It helps one expand their customer base and even increases sales. However, most people do not have the technical knowledge or skill to truly make the most of their mobile friendly site. There is a lot that goes into it, like knowing the right type of site to build and having a solid SEO strategy. Conversely, there is a solution for the average man or woman, they can hire a technology consulting company. Often times they can help make technology understandable to the average person, but most importantly they specialize in things like web design and search engine optimization, and can assist your business with any other technological needs that you may have to make the most of your business.

Need computer advice or IT support in central Texas? Consider contacting tekRESCUE, your web design & SEO Company serving Austin TX and surrounding areas.

When developing a website, especially for a business, it is important to have high-quality content. A visitor will not stay on the page long if it does not provide some value to them. While building the website, it is also important to have some pictures as part of the design. Images, as a part of the web design, can attract visitors in San Marcos and help bring the description to life.

Great for Skimming

If visitors happen upon the website they are often going to skim the content. The picture can attract their attention and offer a break from the text. This picture can help a visitor understand what the site is about and allowed them to stay on the page for a longer time.

Pictures and Captions

Having captions on the pictures can give them an added benefit. The context of the picture will be clear to the viewer and they will be able to determine how the image relates to the text. This will allow users to see the pictures and related words that go with it.

High Quality

If the pictures are on the site they must be high quality and they look professional. If a person is selling a product it is important to see the full product in the best possible light. Pictures in 3D will work best so that a person can get a feel for how the product looks. These pictures can also be shown in a 360-degree angle. If a company is going to release a blog or a newsletter they can include more personal pictures.

Be Consistent

It is important to post pictures of the same quality. People will come to expect consistency and any photos that are low quality can hurt the site. The pictures should be easy to search and appeal to the visitors of the site.

Give the Site Personality

Anyone can post plain text on the site. While the text may be interesting to read it can get dull. Pictures will make the site more interesting. This will add some personality to the site and make it stand out from others. If a person posts quality photos of people working within the community or using any products sold on the site it will bring the ideas to life.

Add Some Color

Plain text is often just black writing against a white background. While this can be easy to read pictures can add some color to the site. They will stand out against the text and draw the attention of the visitors to these pictures. This will hold their interest longer and allow them to spend more time on the site.

These are some benefits of having pictures on a website. When performing website design in San Marcos TX, it is important to post high-quality pictures on these sites. This will allow a visitor to get a visual of the text on the site and get a feel for what the site is really about.

Consider tekRESCUE as your web development company in San Marcos, Texas

Are you a business owner looking to grow your business? There is likely a good chance that you have forgotten about the importance of doing effective marketing. Without a great marketing strategy, you could see yourself facing many uphill battles when trying to grow.

Choose The Right Strategy

As you brand and raise your visibility to diverse groups of people, you will gain a competitive edge against your competitors. If you have a great marketing strategy, then you are able to attract more sales and customers.

Marketing Attracts More Sales

The main reason why business owners market their businesses is to attract more sales. More sales result in more profit and more growth for the business. Growth in sales means that you are able to have the money to grow and expand your business.

Great Marketing Improves the Reputation

You also need to ensure that you are improving the reputation of your business. Great marketing helps customers build their trust in you, and trust is critical for ensuring that you are able to have a positive and transparent reputation through engaging with customers.

Building a Great Reputation Creates an Audience

You should also ensure that you have been able to build a great reputation among your audience. Data and metrics are able to empower you to learn more about the target customer, and this is precisely the kind of data you are able to gather from good marketing to ensure that you are able to learn about your audience.

Builds Trust With Prospects

Marketing is also what is able to help you build trust with your prospective audience. Trust is what helps you keep your customers engaged and interested. Combine this with a great marketing strategy, and you are able to achieve nearly anything with your business.

Build Your Knowledge Base

You are also able to build your knowledge base of what is and isn’t working as you increase your spending on marketing. This will enable you to learn about what you should and shouldn’t do. There are some things that you should do, and some things to avoid when you are looking to build your business.

Improve Your Understanding of Your Market

With effective marketing, you are also able to build an understanding of what is able to work for your business. Metrics are able to help you assess what is and what isn’t working. Your marketing strategy will evolve over time. As you learn more about what is and what is not working, you will build a deeper understanding of the marketplace. Building a great persona is able to help you create the best positioning for understanding your customers.

We are in a very competitive marketplace, because most consumers have so many choices to pick from when they are looking at different products to choose from. The key is to understand the differences between you and your competitors, and to be able to utilize great marketing tactics alongside various IT services in order to be able to generate the maximum amount of value from your campaigns and marketing efforts around Austin, TX.

For more search engine optimization or SEO related topics for San Marcos & Austin TX, take a look at our blog page!

As mobile devices increasingly become the de facto way to access the Internet, a website’s loading speed has become more important than ever before. If your potential customers feel like your website is taking too long to load, they’ll likely leave and visit a competitor’s site instead. Additionally, search engines are increasingly using page load speeds as a ranking factor—meaning your site’s presence in search engines might suffer if it isn’t optimized for speed.

Whether you’re a business owner or a web developer, understanding page speed and how to improve it has become extremely important. To help familiarize you with this tricky subject, we’ve put together an infographic detailing why page speed matters, how web pages are loaded, and tips for making your site faster. If you’d prefer to read the info in text form, scroll past the infographic for an article summarizing its content.

Why Page Speed Matters

Did you know that 43% of website visitors will leave a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load? The average load time of a web page is 3.21 seconds, meaning that the majority of websites are losing nearly half of their potential customers and driving up their bounce rates simply due to poor load time optimization.

If your website is slower than average, the bounce rates only get higher. For every additional one-second delay in page load times, visitors are 11% more likely to leave a website before the page is fully loaded in. This effectively makes your visitor retention rate nonexistent if your landing page takes 8 seconds or longer to load.

On the other hand, faster load times will help retain website visitors much longer. On average, website users will visit 9 pages on a site if the load times are under 2 seconds per page. If a potential customer stays on your site this long, it’ll greatly increase their chances of moving forward with a purchase.

Website Load Time Benchmarks

Before we get into techniques to help your website load faster, it helps to understand the steps it takes for a browser to render a web page on your visitor’s screens. We’ll be breaking down a web page’s rendering process into four seconds and giving you an idea of where an ideal web page should be at the end of every second.

1. First Paint—1 Second
   After the first second, an ideal website should be showing the “first paint” or the initial visuals visible to the browser. First paint should include the web page’s background color as well as header elements that appear at the very top of the page.
2. Contentful Paint—2 Seconds
   Two seconds in to the loading process, your web page should have started to load actual page content such as text and images. Ideally, the above-the-fold content should be fully rendered even if the rest of the page’s content isn’t finished being rendered yet.
3. DOM Loaded—3 Seconds
   After the third second, an ideal web page should be fully parsed by the browser and have all content understood and rendered. This includes all HTML and style sheets. Your web page should feel as though it’s finished loading at this point.
4. Onload—4 Seconds
   After the third second, the page should be fully loaded and begin executing JavaScript and other advanced widgets that could otherwise delay content to load in. It is important that these scripts load last, after the page’s content and style sheets are already completely finished loading.

Tips for Fast Web Speeds

Now that we’ve taken a look at an ideal web page’s rendering process, what can you do to make your website’s pages closer to this ideal? While not everything about a page’s load speed is under your control (your visitors could have slow connection speeds, outdated browsers, or slow hardware), most of it is determined by the way your pages are built and served. Below, we’ll go over a few tips on building and serving a page that loads faster.

1. Prioritize Above-the-Fold Content
   Borrowing from the language of print design, “Above-the-fold” refers to the first content visitors will see on their screen as they visit a web page. This includes the website’s header, page title, and any hero image or content a page might have. It’s important that this content is rendered before anything else, as any delay in its loading will make the page feel sluggish and poorly put together.
2. Optimize Images
   Images are often the most data-intensive part of a web page’s content. While it’s inevitable that pages with large, beautiful hero images will take longer to load than those with simple text content, there are a number of strategies you can use to keep your image file sizes as low as possible without sacrificing too much quality. The most important of these strategies is choosing the right file type for your image—refer to our previous infographic for a full break down of the various image file types you can use on a web page.
3. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
   Finally, you can improve your website’s load speed by optimizing the way it’s served to visitors. One strategy that’s increasing in popularity is to use a CDN, or a network of servers with shared data covering a broad geographic range. This not only improves the time it takes for the servers to get your website data to your visitors, but it also makes visitor’s connection to your site more secure. We use Cloudflare as our CDN at tekRESCUE, but there are many options available in this growing market.

In Conclusion, it’s time to start taking page speeds seriously. Between visitor bounce rates and search engine penalties, the consequences of having a slow website are impossible to ignore. We hope you found this information helpful, and we hope it gets you started on your way to a faster website and more conversions.

As always, feel free to contact the experts at tekRESCUE if you have concerns with your website’s page speeds. We’ll be happy to consult with you and help build you a faster website.