The year saw some big changes to Google My Business features. Some of these were exciting, some were challenging. How will these changes shape your business’ prospects in the coming year? What changes should we continue to look for? Let’s find out.
Google Posts
Google Posts is a product that opened up to all small businesses back in June 2017. This feature allows business owners to promote a sale or an event, which appears when users search for the business. Google Posts gives owners the option of posting one image, and up to 300 characters describing the event or promotion. It can include a landing page that gives more information about the topic. Posts do expire after seven days, but don’t worry … Google lets the business owner know on day six.
Google My Business Messaging
As we continue to move forward in the mobile-friendly world, having multiple messaging platforms for your business will become increasingly more important. In fact, Medium.com states that 46% of those interviewed preferred messaging over email while 49.4% prefer messaging to phone calls. With this in mind, Google My Business rolled out a new messaging feature that allows users to text businesses directly from their phone. Setup is simple and can be accessed from your Business dashboard under the Messaging tab. This tool is one that will continue to benefit businesses in the years to come.
Google My Business Q&A Feature
Google My Business Q&A is a feature that has been slowly rolling out since August 2017. The feature allows users to ask the business owner and the community questions about products or services. Though this feature has room for greatness this coming year, we are seeing it get off to a rough start. Unless you are an android user with the Google maps app, chances are you are not seeing your customers’ questions. Additionally, the feature is not available on the GMB desktop yet. What can you do? For now, you will need to check your listing manually for any questions. Is there a common question everyone asks? Post the question and answer it beforehand so that users can have accurate answers.
More Integration With Google Home
As home assistant devices such as Google Home and Google Assistant become more utilized, it will be extremely important to keep your business information up to date in the new year. Why? Devices like Google Home pull information directly from search engines. The more accurate and up-to-date your information is on GMB, the more likely Google will feature your business when asked for your service.
This year brought us many new and exciting changes to Google My Business. But the new year arriving, we look forward to seeing how these changes can further develop our online marketing techniques.
If you need help with making your Google My Business listing up-to-date and accurate, reach out to us! We’re ready to help you make this feature work for you.
*https://medium.com/hijiffy/10-graphs-that-show-the-immense-power-of-messaging-apps-4a41385b24d6
