Link Your Socials to Your GMB
No, we don't mean the breakfast show Good Morning Britain...
Google My Business (GMB) or Google Business Profile as it is now known, gives business owners real-time and flexible control over the information that is displayed in the box on the right hand side of the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). This is a very important element of online marketing as it is often where potential customers will get your opening hours, contact details or other information from without having to visit your website.
Potential customers can get all the information they need about a business from the GMB box, and even call you straight from that page on their smartphone. They can also read reviews from other customers and see events that you've got lined up. We know it's disheartening to put a lot of effort into your website only for people to skip it in favour of the GMB listing, but this is part of a zero-click strategy where you forego web traffic numbers to make your customers' lives easier
Google adds new features, or elements of control all the time and although some data is populated automatically from information scraped from the website, business owners are being handed more and more of the reins. The latest example is the opening up of the social links in the GMB box – while this used to be populated from a website (and then only if you had the correct code in the correct area of the page design) it is now something you can manually edit.
These social links should show up towards the bottom of the box, underneath the reviews (although they are not available on all accounts just yet), and you can add a link for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok and YouTube. Having a link for each platform isn't advisable if you're not very active on all of them, so stick to the main three or four that your audience is likely to use.
Your social media links can be added in the Business Information > Contact area of the management interface but do check Google's guidelines on the format of the URL to ensure you're using the right format, and that you're not inadvertently pasting in a trackable link that might skew your page metrics.
Each platform can have one link, so if you have multiple accounts on each platform (perhaps for different user groups or geographic areas) pick the one that will appeal to the greatest number of people. Different locations of the same business, provided they have their own GMB box, can use the same social media link on each GMB profile. You can edit and remove social media links as needed, but currently there is no performance indicator within the GMB tool to show you how well each one is performing.
This is something we can do for you when we're setting up social and GMB profiles; as part of digital marketing it's another of the things we can do that will help raise your profile, attract customers, boost your social media following and consolidate your online presence.
