“Local businesses are core to our communities, but the impact of COVID-19 has been tough on business owners. Over the past few months, we’ve added tools and features to make it easier for businesses to keep customers informed, including the ability to add dining options and updated hours to Business Profiles.“
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Dominique McGowan
Program Manager, Local Small Business Products

Recently we’ve noted that Google is adding new local-oriented features to Business Profiles of verified brick & mortar stores (or, “physical storefront”) restaurants, and other Main Sreet small businesses. Google has also been adding tools and features to make it easier for local businesses to keep local customers informed, including the ability to add changing dining options and updated hours. 

Yesterday (May 11, 2020), Google announced it is adding “support links” to its Business Profiles. With this feature, merchants can provide their customers with donations or gift card links.

To start, Google is partnering with PayPal and GoFundMe for donations. For gift cards, merchants can link directly to the relevant page on their website or to their gift card offerings with one of Google’s eligible partners, which include Square, Toast, Clover and Vagaro.

(While Google is not charging merchants or consumers any fees, there may be partner processing fees associated with campaigns.)

According to McGowan, the feature launch will begin with a subset of businesses “to protect against misuse” with plans to expand to more countries, merchants, and partners in a safe and responsible way. The feature will first be rolled to the following countries:

• United States
• Canada
• United Kingdom
• Ireland
• Australia
• New Zealand

Business eligibility

According to Google, participation eligibility criteria includes:

• Businesses must be verified before March 1, 2020.
• Businesses must have a physical storefront.
• Owners and site managers of the Business Profile can use the posts feature to add gift-cards and donation links.
• The feature is available only in select countries.

For more information visit Google My Business help.

Yesterday (May 5, 2020), Yelp, the popular online local business directory, announced a major change and enhancement called Yelp for Business. It is “a new way for business owners to understand their performance and manage their presence on Yelp,” according to Alon Shiran, Yelp’s director of product management.

Yelp for Business is an entirely reimagined platform designed to improve the business owner experience with a fresh new user interface that gives business owners more transparency and insight into their Yelp Business Page. This release is the first step in the company’s plans to completely overhaul the business owner experience in order to increase customization and efficiency on the Yelp platform by the end of 2020.”

Alon Shiran 
Yelp director of product management

Updated or new features of Yelp for Business include:

• Recommendation Cards: Step by step prompts on how business owner sets up their profile.
  
• Tips: Business owners will find “tips” sprinkled throughout the home page that will guide them toward the next best steps to reach consumers.
  
• Content Feed: The new integrated content feed shares relevant information to business owners based on their particular category and industry. (At first, business owners will be directed toward COVID-19 related content specifically geared toward helping them get through this time.)
  
• Faster load and response time: According to Yelp, the new platform is 30% faster than the previous Business Owner Account. 

The new platform is currently available to all business owners and can be accessed in their Yelp for Business account, according to Shiran.  

To begin the process, Google is linking several Google services that feeds a small business’ information to Google My Business and an array of constantly updated maps.

Here are some Google-related basics

1. Update business hours
   
   If your business is operating on reduced or shifted hours, you can update them on you Business Profile through Google My Business. Do this so that customers know exactly when you are able to reach them.
   
   Tip: Double check your phone number and make sure it is correct. Also, turn on messaging to make sure customers can reach you! 
   
   
2. Share a COVID-19 update
   
   Since every business’s response to coronavirus is unique, Google has introduced COVID-19 posts – featured prominently in a carousel on the merchant’s Business Profile in Search (and coming soon to Maps). This is how businesses can communicate to your customers about how your operations and services have shifted. Updates can include safety precautions you are taking, information about what products and services are available, and whether your customers can expect delays. 
   
   
3. Showcase business “attributes“
   
   Many restaurants and retail shops have closed their doors to on-site customers but are still serving them in other ways, for example: Merchants in the dining and shopping verticals can now update their business profiles to inform customers about service availability.
   
   Restaurants can add “takeout,” “delivery” and/or “curbside pickup” attributes and mark that they’re unavailable for “dine-in,” while retail stores will soon be able to add “curbside pickup,” “in-store pickup” and/or “same-day delivery.” 
   
   Business operations will prominently appear on merchants’ business profiles on Google Search and Maps results when customers look for the business. 
   
   
4. Share inventory online
   
   With various or changing shortages of groceries and home essentials, people have to make important decisions about when to leave home to purchase critical goods.
   
   Pointy (now part of Google), helps merchants get their inventory online by connecting information from the merchant’s point of sale systems to their business profile online. (For a limited time, Pointy is available for free to select grocery stores, pharmacies and convenience stores in the US.)
   
   Check if your store is eligible.
   
   
5. Mark a location “Temporarily closed”
   
   Google has made it easier for businesses to mark themselves as temporarily closed — directly from Google My Business.
   
   Note: If a business is marked as temporarily closed, it will be treated similarly to open businesses and will not affect local search rank.

Who Needs to Use Google’s SEO Starter Guide?

According to Google, the guide won’t provide any secrets that will automatically rank your site first in Google, but following the best practices outlined in the guide will make it easier for search engines to “crawl, index and understand your content.”

Basic SEO advice for novices — and experts, alike

1. Build and maintain a website that benefits or helps your users.
2. Successful search engine optimization is geared toward making the user experience better.
3. Better user experience can mean different things but for small businesses.
4. Google accounts for a dominate usage of search engine usage, worldwide. (Depending on how measured, up to 95%.)
5. Among the users of your website are search engines — advanced technology and software that help users discover and use your content, product, knowledge, etc.
6. Better SEO practices can improve the performance of all sizes and types.

Links to the topics in Google’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide

• Getting started
• Help Google find your content
• Tell Google which pages shouldn’t be crawled
• Help Google (and users) understand your content
• Manage your appearance in Google Search results
• Organize your site hierarchy
• Optimize your content
• Optimize your images
• Make your site mobile-friendly
• Promote your website
• Analyze your search performance and user behavior
• Appendix: Link URLs used in the guide

More Search Result Resources From Google

Webmaster Central Blog
Information about updates to Google Search.

How Search Works
What happens behind the scenes when you search for something in Google Search.

Google Webmasters Twitter
Follow Google for news and resources to help you make a great site.

Art: GettyImages

If your small business wants to use video online for marketing, training, or other business purposes, you probably think first of YouTube. However, there are several video hosting services other than YouTube. One alternative to YouTube is Vimeo, a hosting service that is popular with both professional and passionate-amateur video producers. (YouTube’s business is primarily advertising while Vimeo is a fee-based video hosting service.)

One free service that Vimeo provides to video producers is a helpful “school” that can help lead a user straight to a trove of helpful information and tips. Here are links to the types of helpful information you will find at Vimeo’s Video School.

Shooting & Gear

Here’s where you can find gear reviews, video production tutorials, and other pointers.

Lighting & Sound

Many times, the difference in creating a great video and a so-so one is the quality of lighting and sound. These tutorials can provide you some quick and easy advice on how to improve the quality of your video.

Pre-Production

These articles provide pre-production advice and resources.

Post-Production

Articles on video editing, motion graphics, color grading, and more.

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Previously on SmallBusiness.com | “Infusionsoft Launches Propel, a DIY Marketing Automation Platform for Small Business“

“With the introduction of our new Keap product, we are able to serve an even larger market of small service providers who have been shut out of the benefits of automation because software providers have made it too hard and expensive.” said Keap COO Keith Reed.

Targeted at small service providers such as interior design, home repair, fitness or business consulting, “Keap automates repetitive sales and client-related tasks like appointment scheduling following up on leads/quotes, and collecting payments,” according to Reed.

“As part of a multi-year company and product transformation, we set out to better understand how small businesses meet customer demands today,” said Keap CEO Clate Mask.

Some features of the new Keap software

• Organizes and centralizes customer information and daily work in one place 
   
• Frees small businesses from repetitive tasks to save time
   
• Helps small businesses provide great service to their clients –

Photos: Keap by Infusionsoft, GettyImages

(Updated | November 13, 2018)

One of the handiest features of services like Yelp or Google’s business listings is their display of a company’s hours of operation. Seeing that a shop is “about to close” has stopped me from driving across town on several occasions. But what about those days when a cafe may be closed because of a private party? Or perhaps it may have different hours related to the seasons of the year? There are times when the owner of the business needs to change the time of operation for one day only. Some small restaurants close on the weekend, or perhaps on Mondays. In some countries, shops and cafes close during mid-afternoon hours. On some official U.S. holidays, nearly all American businesses close (Thanksgiving, for example). However, there are certain days that aren’t actually holidays, but on which many businesses close (the day after Thanksgiving, for example). Most confusing are the closing times during the end-of-year shopping holidays, (including the Small Business Saturday).

Here’s how to manage special days and times on Yelp and Google’s listings pages. (Tip: You also should also update your website.)

How to change information related to a special date or time on your company’s Google business listings

Before Starting | If you haven’t already claimed your Google Business listing, start with our tutorial on “How to Start Using Google My Business.” If you’d like to learn a lot about using Google My Business, visit the SmallBusiness.com Guide to Managing a Listing on Google Search and Maps.

Start | Sign in to Google My Business

1. For a single location:
   1. From card view, choose the listing you’d like to set special hours for and click Manage location. If you’re viewing your locations as a list instead of cards, switch to card view by clicking the cards icon  on the right side above your locations.
   2. Click Info from the menu on the left side of the page.
2. For multiple locations:
   1. From list view, select the locations you’d like to set special hours for. If you’re viewing your locations as cards instead of a list, switch to list view by clicking the list icon  on the right side above your locations.
   2. Click the pencil icon  in the top-right corner of the page.

Click the  Special hours section | (You’ll only see this section if you’ve already provided regular hours.)

• • Click Confirm hours next to an upcoming holiday. Or click Add new date to choose a different date.

• • Enter the opening and closing times for that day.

• • Slide the circle to “Closed” to indicate that the location is closed all day.

• • If you’re open 24 hours, click Opens at and select 24 hours from the drop-down menu that appears.

• • If you enter closing hours past midnight, make sure to set them properly.

• When you’ve finished entering all of your special hours, click Apply.

Your special hours will appear to customers on Google only for the designated days.

How to set a special date or time on your Yelp business listing

First things first | If you haven’t done so already, find and claim your Yelp Business Page. (More information about claiming your business.) After you have claimed your Yelp Business Page and have been verified by Yelp, do the following.

Log-in at biz.yelp.com. (You may also want to download the Yelp for Business Owners app for mobile access.)

Log into the Yelp for Business Owners admin page on either the app or your Yelp listings page.

• On “Business Information” select “Special Hours.”
• Mark your business as being closed or opened during a specific window of time.
• Special hours are set on a day-by-day basis, so add each day where your operating hours will be different from the hours regularly listed on Yelp.

Once your hours are set, customers will see a banner highlighting your special hours on your Yelp Business Page as well as call outs in the hours’ section.

istock, yelp.com

Facebook is opening nine holiday pop-up stores in Macy’s around the U.S. that will feature 100 digital-native brands and small businesses that have found success on Facebook or Instagram. In other words, there are some things about retailing that begs for high-touch, not just high tech.

According to Facebook, millions of people discover brands and products they love on Facebook and Instagram (which is owned by Facebook). The pop-up stores will allow customers to get up-close and personal with around 100 of these products. The digital-native businesses will have the opportunity to showcase their brands in a physical location, allowing shoppers to feel the brand’s clothing for themselves, according to Facebook.

The pop-up stores will be in Macy’s in the following cities

• New York City
• Pittsburgh
• Atlanta
• Fort Lauderdale
• San Antonio
• Las Vegas
• Los Angeles
• San Francisco
• Seattle

Among the 100 products that will be featured

• Love Your Melon
• Charleston Gourmet Burger Company
• Two Blind Brothers (Photo below)
• Bespoke Post

Image | TwoBlindBrothers.com
Image | Facebook

A social media manager tasked with posting ten stories in a day with a budget to promote four of those stories can schedule the sequence of social media posts in over seven trillion ways. Which of those seven trillion options should they choose to post?

Recently, three graduate business school academics (Vamsi K. Kanuri of Notre Dame, and Shrihari Sridhar and Yixing Chen of Texas A&M) tackled a vexing problem for those who market their companies with social media posts (and tweets, we guess): “What are the best times to post?” (Really, we don’t make up these research projects. We even read it in the Harvard Business Review.)

It’s an important issue, according to the professors, as U.S. companies are expected to spend more than $37 billion dollars annually on social media by 2020 — representing 24 percent of the economy’s total digital advertising spend. And a lot of these dollars will be spent by small businesses.

Rather than posting randomly, there is a better way to spend that advertising budget, say the professors. Their research on circadian rhythms suggests that content platforms like CNN, ESPN, National Geographic, etc. can enhance their profit payoffs by at least eight percent by:

• Posting content following the biological responses of their audience’s sleep-wake cycles
• Targeting content types to when the audience is most naturally receptive to it

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Working Memory

According to their research, the professors’ posting recommendations are tied into what is called, “Human Working Memory.”  This type of memory is highest when we wake up in the morning, lowest in mid-afternoon, and moderate in the evening. “Higher availability of working memory makes individuals alert and feel the need to seek information. This means that consumers’ desire to engage with content will likely be highest in the morning, lowest in the afternoon, and moderate in the evening,” they write.

Here are some of the recommendations they culled from their interviews:

• All else equal, posting content in the morning results in higher engagement.
• Boosting posts (paying to promote posts) is most effective when the target audience is experiencing low working memory.
• Assuming the majority of the audience start their day in the morning, it is ideal to post content conveying high-arousal emotion (i.e., angry or worried) in the morning and “deep think” content in the afternoon.
• A firm does not need an additional boosting budget to increase gross profits. Simply rearranging the posts to match content preferences of the target audience can do the trick.
• Increasing boosting budget does not necessarily increase gross profits. There is a tipping point where additional spending results in only marginal increases in gross profits.

Harvard Business Review | A Study Shows the Best Times of Day to Post to Social Media”

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Are you one of the 50 million users (they now say 30 million) whose Facebook accounts were breached recently? Here’s how to find out if you were and what to do.  (via Brian X. Chen of NYTimes.com and  Josh Constine of TechCrunch.com)

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While logged in to your Facebook account, click to this Facebook Help page. 

If you see the following message, congratulations!

Is my Facebook account impacted by this security issue?

Facebook’s response if you are not impacted | “Our investigation is still ongoing, but based on what we’ve learned so far, the attackers did not gain access to information associated with your Facebook account.”

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If you see the answer “yes,” here’s what to do.

1. Watch out for spam or scam calls, emails or messages as your contact info could have been sold to criminal hackers.
2. Be on alert for phishing attempts that may try to email you and get you to sign in to one of your online accounts on a fake page that will steal your data. Facebook provides this advice.
3. If you’ve had your personal bio info accessed, you may want to contact your bank or cell phone provider and add additional security layers such as a pin code.
4. That’s because hackers may have enough biographical info to perform social engineering attacks where they pretend to be you and use stolen data to answer security questions and gain access to your accounts so they can spam your friends, steal and sell your social media handles, or port your phone number to their phone to intercept two-factor authentication prompts.

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How to delete  your Facebook and Instagram accounts forever

If you’ve decided it’s time to delete Facebook from your digital life, New York Times tech reporter Brian X. Chen has put together in-depth directions for removing both Facebook and Instagram. He also includes reasons you may not want to go all the way.

Note | If you use Facebook for marketing your business, we strongly suggest that you hold off on pulling the plug.

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