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GBP Platform Posting

Scheduling, recurring posts, spintax, and including images

C
Written by Customer Support Team
Updated over a year ago

To post to your GBP listing, the first thing you’ll need to do is click into any location. You’ll then want to click the posts option on the left side of the screen. After that, you can create a new post by clicking the blue Add Post button. See the screenshot below for reference.

The first thing you’ll need to do on the next page is determine what kind of post you’re creating. There are four choices: standard, event, offer, and alert. The alert option is only for posting information about Covid-19. If you want to post an offer or event, make sure you fill out the corresponding fields appropriately. You can see us move through these options in the recording below.

Next, begin typing the text of your post in the summary box. You will see a preview of the way your post will look (one of many options if you’re using spintax– we have an entire help article about spintax if you’re unfamiliar with it). The recording below shows a simple example of how the preview window may display your post on Google Maps. This example contains some instances of spintax. Clicking the regenerate spintax button shows another way the post may appear on Google Maps. The recording below will make this much easier to understand.

Spintax is useful for recurring posts, which we will discuss shortly. You wouldn’t use spintax in a standalone post. There wouldn’t be any need to. The way you create an instance of spintax is by opening a curly bracket, one of these {, and then list options separated by pipes (the vertical character | you can create by holding the shift key and pressing the button underneath the backspace button on most keyboards). So, if we created this instance of spintax, {a|b|c}, only a or b or c would show up where you’ve put that spintax instance. Take a look at the screenshot below. Pay attention to the window on the left, where you’d type your post, and the window on the right, an example of what could be posted to Google Maps.

You can schedule these posts to repeat by clicking the recurring post slider at the bottom of the post page. In the screenshot below, you’ll see the two fields that appear after clicking the recurring post slider. The first one is recurrent days and the second one is the count. In the screenshot below, we’ve input 7 for the recurrent days. That means this post would go live once a week, or every seven days. The count, ten, means it would post weekly for the next ten weeks. Recurring posts are a good way to sit down, type a post, and be sure that you’ll have at least one post per week (although you can specify any recurrence period you like), which is the minimum amount of post activity we recommend. Including many instances of spintax in your recurring posts is a good way to ensure that you will never have a duplicate post go live on your Google Business Profile location.

You also have the ability to add images to your post. Click the Select Image (see below) to upload an image from your hard drive or select one you’ve previously uploaded.

After clicking the Select Image button, a pop-up will appear with two options. To upload a new image, click the Browse files button you see when the pop-up opens. To use an image you’ve previously uploaded, click the gallery option. Whether you upload a new image or pick one from the gallery, the next step will be entering EXIF data associated with the image. If you are well versed in EXIF, feel free to add any information you like to all of the fields. If you are not an EXIF expert, choose the recommended EXIF data option from the drop-down menu at the top of the EXIF data pop-up. Choosing this option is generally a good idea unless you have a specific reason for doing otherwise. Watch the recording below to get a better understanding of these steps.

After your image is added, you can click the blue Submit button to have the post immediately go live. There is an option to schedule it to post later if that’s what you’d like to do. Click the Schedule post slider and then choose a date and time from the field that appears. Watch the recording below to gain a better understanding of how to schedule your post. In this case, we’ve scheduled the post to go live at 10:30 AM on April 6, 2023.

After you are done scheduling your post, click the blue Submit button on the bottom of the page. Your post will then go live on your GBP location at the date and time you've specified.

That is everything there is to know about posting to your GBP location.

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