What Types of GMB Posts are Available?
Many businesses are still missing out on a great feature within their Google My Business (GMB) listings. Posting on your GMB listing has many benefits and can help build your business and gain more customers and clients. Learn about the different types of GMB posts and how to win over your clients.
There are 5 different types of posts and we are going through each of them and explaining their many benefits and uses. The 5 types of posts are:
- Whats New Posts
- Event Posts
- Offer Posts
- Welcome Offer Posts
- Product Posts
Whats New Posts
With a Whats New post you can showcase any new business updates, new team members, blog posts, any reviews or testimonials and anything else happening at your business. All of these updates can help bring attention to your business. It is also huge in building trust with your customers and clients.
A Whats New post is allotted up to 1500 characters when writing your posts. It also offers opportunity to utilize images or videos. Both images and videos are extremely important when creating posts. Your posts are more likely to grab a viewers attention and keep them on your listing when they see an image or video. Suggested size of your images or videos is 1200 x 900 px and max file size of a video is 100 MB.
A Call to Action (CTA), is a line of text or image that prompts your visitors to click and perform a specific action. A Whats New post offers several CTA opportunities for your listing including:
- Book
- Learn More
- Order Online
- Buy
- Sign Up
- Call Now (use the primary number of your GMB listing)
- Add a Button Optional (If you don’t want to add a link)
New posts will stay active for 7 days and will be displayed above any existing posts that have yet to expire. After 7 days your posts do not disappear. Instead they show up under post navigation on mobile searches and under the “View All” if on a desktop. Most of these types of GMB posts follow similar guidelines but some are unique.
In the Knowledge Panel of the listing your visitors can find a thumbnail preview of the post before clicking to see the entire post. There are a limited number of characters available for thumbnail text and this could be cut by using a CTA such as “Learn More.”
Events Posts
If your business is involved in, attending, supporting or hosting an event you can promote that event using an event post. It could be any sort of worthy event whether it is in store, a charity, or part of your local neighborhood. This is the better of the types of GMB Posts for when your business is holding an event.
In your event post you can use up to 58 characters to create a title. If you use all 58 characters allotted your title will be cut off in the thumbnail view of the post. When your title or CTA in the thumbnail get cut off you will see a “. . .” displaying the cut off. The thumbnail can be effected by CTA buttons, text and dates.
Like the What’s New post, Event posts can also use images and video. The same dimension recommendations and video sizes apply. If you use the built in photo editor make sure your optimizing the dimensions of the image or video otherwise the editor will display an unsightly black background behind the upload.
Event title also work like What’s New titles and allow 58 characters. When writing the body or description your allotted 1500 characters. Some businesses like to create short and sweet posts while some like to use the full available space.
Using Start/End dates you can select the appropriate dates for the event. Though you don’t have to include an end date on your event, if you create a new post it will still take precedent over your never ending event post pushing it down on the display hierarchy. Along with dates you can add times for your events. Like dates, they have a start and an end time and can be displayed down to the minute.
Event posts also offer CTA buttons. All & CTA buttons that are available in the What’s New posts are available for event posts.
Events in the business profile are not connected to Google Event Posts. These events come from other third party sources like Eventbrite or even your own website and marked up using Event Shema or structred data markup. You can take advantage of this by creating an event on your business website and make an event post on your GMB with exact details and link it to the schema markup on your website.
Offers Posts
Offer posts allow you to promote sales, offerings, or discounts currently offered by your business. These posts include a bright yellow tag (visible on both mobile and desktop) that are very attention grabbing.
Images and videos work just like above and are recommended to make your offer more compelling to your viewers. Your title and details sections of the post also operate the same way as previously mentioned posts. Your allotted 58 characters for your title and 1500 characters for your details section.
Coupons are an optional addition for Offers posts. Not only making your post more enticing and exclusive, coupons can help you track the exact conversions your business is getting through your GMB listing.
Another optional feature of Offer posts is a “link to redeem offer” button. This works as your CTA of the post. This adds a URL to a landing page that provides your searchers with additional information about your offer including how they can redeem the offer. If this option is used it will be displayed as a “Redeem Online” button.
If creating an offer posting for a client its strongly recommended to add the Terms and Conditions feature. It can be as simple as “See website and contact us for rules and regulations.” You want to make sure the viewers are quickly able to be informed.
Welcome Offer Posts
Released in June 2019, Welcome Offer posts were introduced to convert followers to customers. This offer is only available to viewers who opt to follow your business on the Google Maps app. Since its only displayed on the maps app your business needs to download the app in order to create this type of post. Unlike the regular Offers post, there is no yellow tag.
The Welcome Offer types of GMB posts follow the same criteria as the regular offers post for the title, details, start/end dates, images and videos and terms and conditions.
A new feature of these posts is adding a website. By adding a URL you can create a link to a landing page that includes more information on the offer and if its redeemable online. Unlike the Offer posts, there is no “Redeem Online” button.
Product Posts
Product posts provide the opportunity to promote and highlight specific items that your business offers or sells. These posts have their own navigation heading in mobile searches.
Instead of a post title you have a Product name. The name does work just like the title with a 58 character max. Besides that change your other options are the same. The post can stille include images or videos, descriptions and CTA options. An optional feature is the price description. You can have an exact amount, a min to max slider or opt to exclude a price of the product.
What’s the Best Post Type?
Each post type has its specific uses so one isn’t better than the other. All types of GMB Posts have the potential to show up as Post Mentions in the local finder results. This can help your overall click through rates and turn into increased business.
Its time to utilize posts in your GMB listing. Go make your brand stand out in search results and increase engagement with your listing. Learn more about post optimization on another article by G Map Pros here.