Last year Google introduced a new feature that allowed Google My Business (GMB) listings to share certain ‘posts’ in Google Search and on Google Maps. Today, after running several tests to determine the effectiveness of GMB posts in apartment marketing, Respage is announcing that our users will soon have the ability to integrate GMB postings with our dashboard.
We created the following post to help apartment marketers gain a better understanding of what GMB posts are, why they’re great for your property’s listing, and how Respage can help with multifamily marketing and maximize your potential.
What Are Google My Business Posts?
The first thing you should know about GMB posts is that they are not the social posts you might be familiar with through the-soon-to-be-defunct Google+. As such, your friends, fans and followers can not share them through likes, comments, etc. Furthermore, the posts only remain active for seven days before Google removes them from your GMB page. So we can’t really consider them blog content either.
But don’t let those facts get you down. What GMB posts lack in the social sharing category, they more than make up for in the Search experience category…
Instead of allowing you to share content on a network, GMB posts allow apartment marketers to share content directly in Search and Maps, giving you more opportunities to prove why your community is the right place for the search user. Each post comes with an image, a title, a short description, and a call to action.
Essentially, Google My Business posts are free ads!
Why Should Apartment Marketers Use Google My Business Posts?
Using Google My Business posts gives your community more Search/Maps real estate, effectively increasing your property’s online visibility, which in turn can lead to more website traffic and brand recognition. Adding to that, the things that you promote through posts can serve as filters or incentives, qualifying your leads before they even click on your website.
Apartment marketers have excellent opportunities to take advantage of these posts by advertising events like open-houses, or promotions that deduct the first month’s rent for new residents.
Up until the release of GMB posts, these types of promotions really weren’t possible through Search unless you were running apartment PPC ad extensions.
How Will Respage Help With Apartment GMB Posting?
Within the next several weeks, our users will be able to schedule Google My Business posts through the Respage dashboard. After carefully reviewing and testing the post formats offered by Google, we’ve determined that the offers/promotions and events options are the best suited post types for the multifamily industry.
Once this new feature is live, users will have the ability to create a promotion/offer and events and schedule start/end dates in advance for each of their individual properties, all within our system. When the end of the promotion approaches, we’ll notify the user and provide him/her with a chance to continue running the promo.
Look out for more updates on this new feature in the coming weeks!
