Transcription
If you didn’t already have enough ways that people could contact you – phone, email, Facebook Messenger, Instagram Messenger, Google have now introduced another one to keep an eye on.
People can now, via the Google Maps app on their phone, send you a direct message or instant messages via that app, that you can then respond to using the Google MyBusiness app on your phone.
Well, let’s have a look at that now.
Hi, I’m Jason Foss. I got a notification through on my phone the other day from the Google MyBusiness app letting me know that people could now contact me directly via that. So I had a bit of a look around as to what was going on there and found this article from Google.
How it works is that if you have a Google MyBusiness listing, and therefore are visible through Google Maps, people can now contact you that way. There’s a bit of a screen animation here.
People can find your listing on maps, through sidebar tap Messages, and then start to contact you that way. This can also be done through a regular Google search by the looks of it. If they get the Google MyBusiness listings, the message button there, and they’ll be able to direct message you via those means.
I had a look inside the Google MyBusiness listing on the web, and this is what it looks like. There’s a messaging tab down here, but it requires either the Android app or the iPhone app to run it. If you’re not sure what you’re looking for, this is the icon. So that’s the fellow you want to install on your phone if you want to respond to direct messages that come via your listing on Google Maps or your Google MyBusiness listing in the regular organic stuff.
So there we go, another messaging channel to keep an eye on. I guess it’s not too bad if you’ve got alerts set on your phone. It’ll go ping if somebody needs to, is expecting a reply from you. But yeah, just something you also add to your list.
I’m Jason Foss. Thanks for watching.