The importance of a Google Business Profile & how V5 Digital can get you listed

Running a business can be tough, especially when it comes to marketing. So it’s always great to find something easy and impactful to use to increase business leads.

Google Business Profile marketing, formally known as Google My Business, is a modern-day necessity! Potential customers use it to find and compare products and services and those not using it are often ignored.

So we’ve established that GBP is essential to your business but what exactly is it?

Setting up a Google Business Profile is an easy way to direct more traffic to your website

What Is A Google Business Profile?

At its core, a Google Business Profile is a search engine that helps customers locate businesses based on their keywords and search location. It’s often the first interaction potential customers have with a company.

Adding photos, hours of operation, and contact information means users can get a great deal of information at a glance. Selecting a business category helps Google to better index your website and claiming a free listing on Google Maps brings clients right to your door.

Increases Visibility

We’re all aware that more visible brands bring in more leads. A Google Business Profile can effortlessly increase your visibility and help connect your products and services to those desperately trying to find them.

A GBP helps you manage your online presence and keeps you in control of how your business is perceived across the web. It attracts new eyes to your website and employs local SEO maps to show potential customers where they can find you.

Helps Customers Locate Your Physical Address

Every day countless people hop on the internet, look for a product or service, find it, check the operating hours, and then use Google Maps to go to the location they need.

A Google Business Profile reassures potential customers that you’re a legitimate business, shows them what you offer, and gets them to your physical address.

If your business isn't linked to Google Maps you might as well be invisible!

Helps Customers Review Your Business

Nothing builds trust faster than a good review. It’s a fantastic way to build credibility in your industry and amongst your community. It even improves interactions with stakeholders and the government if they can see, firsthand, the positive impact you have in your area of expertise.

Google Business Profile makes leaving reviews about your business a hassle-free experience. These reviews are not only invaluable for attracting new customers but also give you great feedback about what you’re doing well and where you could improve.

Helps You Understand Your Target Audience

A GBP account can help you understand your target audience and use this information in marketing campaigns and keyword research. This can be handled in-house or outsourced to a company that specializes in GBP optimization.

Business owners can see metrics such as engagement on posts, photos, and profiles and what content is not generating enough traffic. This identifies weaknesses and improves the quality and effectiveness of the content you put out.

It’s also the perfect way to discover what keywords people are searching for and use this information to entice and connect with potential customers. This information can also be used across content channels to improve media campaigns and increase traffic to your website.

A Google business profile is ideal for getting to know your audience on a deeper level. It’s very easy to discover variables such as location, gender, and, age, as well as conversion-related information. Seeing how many people used a certain link to visit your website and how many went on to purchase a product becomes an effortless process.

Tips to Improve GBP Optimization

• Use relevant keywords that attract attention and traffic. Use the right tools to discover the right keywords to help potential customers find you.

• Always use a localized phone number so Google can verify that you’re a real business with a geographical location. This helps Google’s algorithm connect your business with customers in your area.

• Write an accurate business description. Be sure to pick the correct category that your business falls under or your audience won’t be able to find you. Make your description compelling with a strong call to action and don’t forget to mention special holiday operating hours.

• Add high-quality photos and videos of your products, services, and location. This can help distinguish your business from your competitors and create a perception of value in the minds of your target audience.

• Regularly update information such as your website address and phone number. If Google discovers broken links they could penalize you by dropping you in their rankings. This will also harm your reputation.

If this still seems a little confusing, you don’t have time, or you would prefer an expert to handle this for you, feel free to get in touch with V5 Digital where we can help you set up the perfect profile that is sure to succeed.

What’s the Best Time to Post on Facebook in 2022?

If you run a Facebook Business Page, you know that organic reach is dwindling on the platform. The average organic reach on Facebook is 2.2%. This means that if you have 1,000 followers, only 20 of them will see your new posts and updates in their feeds. Sucks, doesn’t it?

Now, the number of people who see your posts depends mostly on Facebook’s algorithms, but there’s one thing you can do to increase your reach and engagement. And that is to post content at the right time.

But when is the best time to post on Facebook?

Does a best time to post on Facebook really exist?

Before we get into this, note that everybody and their grandma has done a study on the best times to post on Facebook (and other social platforms) and the results vary widely. So if you really want to know the best times for you to post on Facebook, you’ll have to take a dive into your own followers and Facebook analytics — because peak times that work for other social media marketers can very well flop on your account.

That being said, recency is a major ranking signal for Facebook. So if you want to boost your odds of appearing at the top of your followers’ feeds, you have to post when they’re online.

If you’re just starting with Facebook and you don’t have an audience yet, you might not know when, exactly, your target audience comes online. In that case, you can start posting at the universal best time the team of social media experts at Hootsuite or Sprout Social recorded in their research.

When you do have an audience, it’s extremely easy to figure out the best times to post on Facebook — especially if you have the right tools. Read on for specific tips!

The best time to post on Facebook

According to Hootsuite’s analysis, the universal best time to post on Facebook is 8:00 am to 12:00 pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

According to Sprout Social's analysis the universal best time to post on Facebook is at 9:00 am to 10 am on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.

For your own brand things might be different as your users might be following a different timeline than the universal market. This is why it is important to monitor your own posts and see what times and days you get the most engagement. There is no one size fits all.

It’s best to post first thing in the morning because this is when people are catching up on their news feeds. Lunchtime is also great because it’s when people tend to have the biggest gaps in their schedules. Just after working hours are effective too, because people are checking out what they missed over the day.

So, as you can see, there’s more to finding your most effective time to post on Facebook than simply knowing when your audience is online.

When posting on Facebook, here are some key Facebook statistics to consider:

• 51% of people check Facebook several times each day

• 74% of users check Facebook at least once a day

• People spend 34 minutes (on average) per day on Facebook

• 80% of people use mobile devices to access Facebook (19% use both mobile and desktop)

How to find the best time to post on Facebook

If you want to find your own best times to post on Facebook, here are six things you should do:

1. Find out when your audience is most active online

Facebook prioritizes recent posts. Why? Because people care about new things — not old things.

Posting content when your followers are most active online can increase the chances that your content will reach them. And when Facebook’s algorithms detect that you’re posting when your fans are browsing through their feeds, it will push your content to the feeds of people who don’t follow you (yet!).

For Facebook, all you have to do to know when your followers are online is to look at your analytics.

V5 Digital Heat map showing user activity

2. Look at your best-performing posts

After you figure out when your audience is online, the next step should be to study the content you’ve posted in the past. Look at your social media reports and analytics tools to see the most successful posts for each metric you track. For instance, check for posts that performed well for:

• Awareness: posts that have high impressions and/or views

• Engagement: posts that have spectacular engagement rates in terms of likes, comments, and shares.

• Traffic/sales: posts that got many clicks

Then, look at the time and day of the week you posted this content, and see the patterns that form.

Pro-tip: You can even see your best times to post on Facebook based on impressions, engagements, and click-throughs.

An example of V5 Digital's best performing posts for the month of July and August 2022

Social Media Management Tools can predict the best times to post your content

3. Post in your audience’s time zone (not yours)

If you want to reach people who scroll through their Facebook accounts as soon as they wake up, posting in the early morning (at 6 am to 7 am) is a good idea. In Africa it is generally good to post between the hours of 6-9 am. The earlier being the better.

If you’re a brand that has a large number of audiences in a particular region, you might want to create a separate Facebook page for that audience. This allows you to post in the language people in that region understand.

If you have a global customer base, you should consider posting content throughout the day. In this case, you’d need a good social media scheduling tool.

4. Study what your competitors are doing

As you work on your Facebook account, you should also check your competitors’ accounts to see what they’re doing–especially if you’re new to Facebook.

Look for their high-performing posts to get an idea of the sort of content your audience might be looking for. Or you could even do a full social media competitor analysis and reverse-engineer your competitors’ Facebook tactics.

For instance, if you notice that your competitors publish content on the hour (the :00 mark), you could try posting on the :15 or :45 mark to get ahead of them.

Keep your ears peeled for news concerning your industry. You might learn strategies worth incorporating, pitfalls to avoid, or opportunities to take advantage of.

5. Test and modify your posting times

After doing your research, you’re ready to press “Publish” on those brand new posts you’ve created. But what would you do if your results aren’t as good as you’d hoped?

Short answer: run A/B tests.

With A/B tests, you post the same content at different times to see which time gets the best results. You can take things up a notch by changing the images (if there are any) on the post or even the post copy itself to see which version performs best.

Pro tip: This advice applies to all social networks, not just Facebook!

6. Keep checking for changes

Facebook is ever-changing, from its algorithms to its users. For instance, since COVID and the surge of remote work in 2020, people use Facebook (and other social media platforms) more. People shifted from scrolling through Facebook during lunch breaks to checking in between Zoom meetings.

You have to look at your top-performing posts weekly to determine if there is any data in there that can provide you with insights to rework your posting time. For example V5 Digital has found that the earlier posts go out on Special Holidays the more engagement they get. So we aim to post our Holiday posts between the hours of 6 and 7 am.

The trick is to regard time as an important, but variable, factor as you tweak your social media scheduling strategy.

Employees Are Facing Burnout

5 Evidence-Based Emotional Intelligence Strategies for Leaders to Rekindle the Fire

When I experienced burnout for the first time, what surprised me most is how little I cared: About my work, my coworkers, and basically anything related to my job. I missed deadlines. I checked out emotionally. I felt detached and cynical about everything. I just did. not. care. – even though I normally pride myself on how much I care. I can only imagine what my bosses – who had come to expect high productivity and a positive outlook from me – were thinking and feeling.

For any leader, it’s a difficult situation – a delicate balance that requires emotional intelligence to navigate. What are best practices for rekindling the fire of an employee experiencing burnout? Let’s define burnout and its causes, and then look at how to use emotional intelligence to best support an employee experiencing burnout.

What Exactly Is Burnout? Burnout is a state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion caused by excessive and prolonged stress. It occurs when you feel overwhelmed, emotionally drained, and unable to meet constant demands. I didn’t know it at the time, but the detached cynicism I felt is a trademark sign of burnout. In fact, it’s one of the 3 defining symptoms of burnout, as defined by the World Health Organization. Burnout is defined by…

• Physical and emotional exhaustion

• Depersonalization / detachment / cynicism

• Decline in sense of personal accomplishment

Burnout is the feeling of being utterly depleted, unmotivated and detached from one’s work. It’s a form of learned helplessness.

What Causes Burnout? What are the key causes of burnout? Research has identified the following factors that play a major role:

• a perceived lack of control or autonomy

• insufficient reward or recognition

• a perceived lack of social support / community

• a perceived lack of meaning / purpose

As you can see in this list, burnout’s causes are deeply linked to basic emotional needs like belonging, purpose, recognition and autonomy. When those needs aren’t met, you experience stress. And when that stress goes unmanaged for a long period of time, burnout can occur. This is certainly not an exhaustive list, and while research suggests a predominant role of company culture in burnout, individual circumstances most definitely play a role. In my case, for example, major stressors outside of work played the biggest role.

So what can you do as a leader to respond compassionately and effectively to an employee experiencing burnout? Here are 5 powerful, evidence-based strategies.

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Is burnout from overwork? Research says no – it’s connected with emotional needs, which is why managers must have emotional intelligence to help employees through.

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How to Respond to Employee Burnout with Emotional Intelligence: 5 Powerful Strategies

Myth: Burnout is from overwork. Fact: Burnout comes from basic human needs being unmet over time. Since these core needs are centered in emotion, for managers to help, it’s time to leverage emotional intelligence (the skills to be smarter with feelings). To make it more challenging, managers can’t fix the problem directly – it’s the employee’s perceptions and emotions that drive burnout… yet the company culture and managerial skills play a major role: the solution is to set a context in which employees can meet those basic needs more often. That is easier said than done, and requires a lot of emotional intelligence. Here’s a step-by-step guide for leaders to reverse the dangers of burnout:

1. Ask how they’re doing… in the right way.

The first step is to check in. It’s often hard to tell what somebody is thinking and feeling, and the only way to find out is to ask and listen. An attitude of curiosity, openness and non-judgment is essential. A few practical tips for this conversation…

Set cultural norms to talk about feelings. This work begins long before a specific instance of burnout or any challenging conversation. Make “normal” to ask about feelings. As a leader, model that you can share your own feelings in a way that’s both vulnerable/authentic and workplace appropriate. Practice asking about and sharing when they’re not-so-intense so you have readiness when things get tough.

Create proper time and space. This isn’t a passing by in the hallway conversation. Make sure you are in a private space, and carve out enough time to have a real conversation. A general rule of thumb is that the more complex and challenging a topic, the more time and space will be needed for a real answer. Burnout is a complex and challenging topic, and will require some time and space to explore. For general tips on connecting and going deeper, read this article from Joshua Freedman about the 3 S’s of communication.

Listen deeply. Listening is deeply connected to several basic human needs, like recognition, belonging, and purpose. Here are some practical tips to practice active listening, which is probably the single most important thing you can do.

Resist the urge to fix. When someone opens up about a struggle, many people feel an irresistible urge to offer solutions. But there probably aren’t quick, easy solutions to a long-term issue like burnout, and offering a solution may not be the best response at all. As Brené Brown says, “Rarely can a response make something better. What makes something better is connection.” That speaks to the real goal of this conversation, to meet that person’s basic needs – in this case, belonging, recognition and validation. For more on the tendency to fix things and why it often isn’t ideal, read this article.

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Managers can’t “fix” employee burnout – it’s the employee’s perceptions and emotions that drive burnout… but they can set a context in which employees can meet those basic needs more often.

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2. Seek out ways to empower them and put them in the driver’s seat.

One of the chief causes of burnout is a perceived lack of control. There are many contributing factors to this feeling, but some of the most common are an unsustainable workload, an inflexible schedule, micromanagement, no time for creative exploration, too many meetings, etc. Since many of us are busier than ever, these things can feel inevitable – even though in reality, they are a result of our choices. Have a conversation with the employee in which you make a plan together to set a context in which they feel more in control. There are many avenues to make that happen, and the right answer ultimately depends on the specific circumstances. Here are a few examples:

Respond without fixing. When the manager steps in to drive solutions, even when done out of positive intention, it sends a message that, “you can’t solve the problem but I can.” Instead, use tentative language (asking vs telling) and a coach-approach (Download our free Coaching with Emotional Intelligence eBook for more on a coach-approach).

Offer support and explore possibilities. Ask them for options; they might have a hard time if they’re on the edge of burnout, but don’t give into the temptation to TELL. This has to be driven by the employee. Together look at options that others have used – move into a dialogue about exploring possibilities. Offer a range of options and help the employee know that you are available to find solutions. You don’t need to commit to any specific action plan, and often that will require approval or collaboration from other groups (such as HR). At this stage, your goal is to send a clear message: You have options, and I will support you in seeking options.

Encourage them to do emotional check-ins throughout the day. This is a great way to understand their stressful triggers, which can help them feel more in control. Here’s a simple emotional intelligence check in to try.

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“The more you give people the freedom and flexibility to shape their own path,” says @petesena, the CEO and Chief Creative Officer of the marketing and design firm @digitalsurgeons, “the more committed they are to the goals of the enterprise.”

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3. Say thank you.

In the craziness of modern work, it’s easy to forget to express gratitude. But what message does a lack of gratitude send to the employee? My work doesn’t matter. I don’t matter. These feelings matter: Insufficient recognition is a leading factor in burnout. The need to feel recognition is a primary human need, on par with belonging and a sense of purpose. The particular challenge in terms of burnout is that those who burn out are often high achievers. They care. They want to go above and beyond. They sacrifice for their work. And as a leader, it’s natural to start taking that production for granted, and focus our attention on employees who aren’t meeting expectations. There are many ways to express gratitude. Here are a couple ideas, because one size doesn’t fit all:

• For some people, an award or bonus feels like recognition, and that may be the appropriate response.

• For most people, it’s relational – a gift of time or a genuine thank you may be more valuable than a monetary reward.

The challenge is to know your people — you can even ask them. For all people, though, recognition is a known antidote to burnout.

4. Incentivize social connection.

A lack of social support is a key driver of employee burnout, and reconnecting is often the most effective way to start healing. As we enter an era of hybrid work when many employees work from home, this will be a particularly challenging topic for leaders to address, as Joshua Freedman (Six Seconds’ cofounder & ceo) covered in-depth in this article. As a leader, here are some options to consider:

• Look at your own schedule and if possible, make time to connect with this employee. This goes back to the emotional check in from #1, but could also be less formal or work-related.

• Create a context in which employees can socialize during work hours, like a work happy hour or mental health day.

• Strategically assign collaborative work to the employee who’s struggling, to make sure they are interacting with coworkers.

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The need to feel recognition is a primary human need, on par with belonging and a sense of purpose. How do you show your people that you value them?

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5. Develop and cultivate a shared sense of ‘why.’

Two symptoms of burnout are cynicism and a decline in sense of personal accomplishment. This combination means the employee has internalized the belief that “My work doesn’t matter.” One of the most important jobs a leader has is to create a compelling and shared vision, about the company’s overall mission and each individual’s contributions to it. Developing a shared sense of ‘why’ may just be the best antidote to burnout. The bad news is that you can’t fake it. If you don’t find your work meaningful or important, good luck convincing your employees that it is. You have to truly believe it yourself, and communicating that may be the single most powerful strategy to help an employee experiencing burnout.

What to Do if Nothing Changes?

If an employee is already feeling burnt out, all of these actions may not have much of an effect, in spite of your best intentions. Hopefully they work, but it’s no guarantee. Like in my personal example, there can be many factors outside the company’s control. The good news is that this list can also serve as a template for creating a context in which employees thrive and instances of burnout are rare. Taking care of people’s basic emotional needs isn’t just the right thing to do, either, it’s good business.

The best antidote to burnout? A culture of emotional intelligence, starting at the top.