#HASHTAG

Creating a Google My Business profile is undoubtedly one of the best ways to attract your target audience’s attention towards your brand and boost your local business’ rankings. However, working with Google My Business can get a bit mind-boggling, considering its numerous features. Among all these features, there is one that you should use – GMB posts. These posts enable businesses to promote their brand, products, services, events, offers, and much more. Your Google My Business posts are shown at the end of the GMB Knowledge Panel, and these are an excellent means to showcase what your brand has got to offer the audience. GET AWARE OF THE GMB POSTS POLICY Crafting GMB posts is no rocket science, but before you get started with the creation process, you must be aware of the GMB Posts content Policy. When it comes to Google My Business posts, you would want to ensure that you are familiar with what is and isn’t cool. If you contravene the GMB posts content policy, the platform will turn down your post, and you will not be able to publish it just as it is. HOW TO MAKE A GOOGLE MY BUSINESS POST? To make a post, all you need to do is log in to your GMB account and go to your dashboard. From there, on the left-hand side, you will find the “Posts” option. Just tap on it. If you are making a GMB post for the first time, a “Create your first post” button will appear on your screen contained in a blue box. On clicking that button, you will see a post popup appearing on your screen. Scroll right to choose the type of post you want to create. Continue reading below to see the types of posts you can make. TYPES OF POSTS YOU CAN MAKE Google provides businesses with a range of different posts you can make. Check it out here. Covid-19 Update With this type of post, you can inform your audience about the various changes to your organization because of the Covid-19 pandemic. This option will probably not be here permanently, but in the meantime, it is there. Offer If you have a special ongoing limited period offer at your business, these posts are best for you. While creating offer posts, you can set a start and end date, add titles, descriptions, and even disclaimers (such as offers valid for one per customer). Once you publish these posts, they will remain live till the offer period. Update Introduced some new changes to your business? Use update posts! These are great for letting the audience know about any latest news related to your company or any other information regarding your brand, products, or services that you think your audience would be interested to know. Update posts are great to inform your customers if you have: Recruited a new employee? Opened your store at a new location? Launched a new product? Such posts are excellent to showcase this type of information to your target audience. Event If you are organizing a new event at your company, such as a new collection launch, ribbon-cutting ceremony, exclusive VIP shopping hours, and much more, event posts are your go-to option. While creating event posts, you get the option to add headings and a date range. It even lets you add times of day as per your wish. Event posts stay live throughout the date range after publishing. Product Product posts are perfect to showcase the products that you have put on sale at your physical store. With these posts, you can add a product name and description, category, pricing, and CTA button. Important Note: Keep in mind, online-only businesses don’t qualify for the Google My Business listing. These product posts are only meant to strengthen and support brick-and-mortar establishments. When making a post, make sure to include a call to action. While the type of CTA you pick depends on the type of post you are creating, here are a few common CTAs people generally use: Buy Learn More Call Now Sign Up Book Order Now In case you are utilizing a URL as part of your CTA, it would be best to use UTM tracking. It will allow you to monitor your results in Google Analytics, and the clicks will be displayed as Direct Traffic. INCLUDE PHOTOS OR VIDEOS While making a post, including an image or a 30-second long video will help capture the viewers’ attention. There is a controversy regarding the ideal image size within the industry, but most suggest that 1200 x 900 pixels is the best image size. Remember, Google My Business Post photos get cropped higher than centered, and this cropping is not steady at all times. Therefore, if you have overlaid text on your photo, run a test to ensure that the text is not getting cut off after publishing the post. It is also a great idea to check your GMB Post on a desktop device and a mobile device because the posts look different on both of them. Apart from this, Google also lets you upload up to 30-second long videos to your Google My Business post. GMB posts stay live for a week or “go dark” after the event date. Nevertheless, your old posts will still show up in your GMB listing. What happens is that the new posts push the old ones down. However, here the Covid-19 updates posts are an exception. These posts stay live for two weeks. To help you maintain consistency, Google will remind you to make new GMB posts before the old ones expire by sending an email. GMB POSTS LOOK DIFFERENT ON DESKTOP AND MOBILE DEVICES Whenever you make a GMB post, keep in mind that things appear differently on desktop devices vs. mobile devices. First of all, your GMB post can consist of up to 1500 characters. Remember that based on what device the user is viewing your post, its text will be cut off. This means you must ensure that you place the “most” necessary information as near to the front of your post as you can. REJECTED POSTS If you contravene the GMB Posts content policy, your post might be rejected. If the platform rejects your post, you will be able to see a “REJECTED” red label. Often the reason behind the rejection of the posts in most cases is the photo or video used in it. However, you may also get your post rejected if they come under the standard sensitive categories following Google’s ad rules. To avoid getting your GMB posts rejected, don’t add website URLs, phone numbers, email addresses, etc., within your posts as they might result in its rejection. Moreover, using all uppercase letters or stock images can also prompt your post rejection. Pro Tip: Hashtags are useless in your GMB posts. Even though Google My Business posts and social media posts look alike, they are not the same. So practically, you will be wasting your space and also come across as a bit silly by including the #hashtag within your posts. You might also want to be a little cautious with the words you are using in your GMB posts. The use of specific words can result in your post getting rejected. While some of these words may sound friendly and good-humored to you, Google might regard them as disrespectful. If you face rejection of your posts, try playing around with the words you have used in the previous post. For example, in a GMB post for an attorney, the words “the truth is” were used, which resulted in the post’s rejection. Therefore, to test what went wrong, those particular sets of words were excluded from the post, and interestingly the post got approved. It may sound weird, but it happened. GMB Posts Boost Engagement Although it hasn’t been proven yet whether or not GMB posts can increase rankings, they sure are an excellent means to capture people’s attention and generate engagement. You can check your insights to see how well your posts are resonating with your target audience. Just go back and analyze your old posts to see how many total views the posts received and how many users clicked your call to action. Moreover, from the Posts section, you can also see the total number of “new” views that your posts got for this week. There is another advantage of utilizing GMB posts. Google’s machine learning has begun leveraging Post content to try to answer the Google My Business Q&As. Hence, if a user asks a query on your GMB Knowledge Panel, Google will look through your posts and reviews to see if any of the content of the posts might answer the user’s query. This is another great reason to make good quality posts for your Google My Business profile. Conclusion Creating quality GMB posts is something that all local businesses should aim to do today that too regularly (at least once a week if possible). Google My Business Posts is an incredible tool, and once you get it right, it can result in site visits, calls, and even sales! Hariom Balhara is an inventive person who has been doing intensive research in particular topics and writing blogs and articles for Tireless IT Services. Tireless IT Services is a Digital Marketing, SEO, SMO, PPC, and Web Development company that comes with massive experiences. We specialize in digital marketing, Web Designing and development, graphic design, and a lot more. SOURCE : Google My Business Posts