Google Maps starts showing social media profiles from your favorite bars and restaurants

Every brand is growing increasingly dependent on social media marketing to improve their visibility to consumers, and that’s why even homegrown businesses lay emphasis on social media presence through the best social apps. Besides the role of its advertising business in such marketing efforts, the company also allows businesses to create their profiles, called Google Business Profiles. Although they are fairly detailed and descriptive, Google now allows to link your business’ social media accounts with the Business Profile.

Google Business Profiles show up in Search results and Maps, giving people immediate access to important information about the business in question, such as their location, contact information, operating hours, rating, and photos of retail locations. In Maps, you’ll also find one-tap shortcuts for directions to the business, calling it, chatting with it, sharing, and saving it for later. That might seem like a whole lot of information, but besides the user-contributed imagery of the storefront and its surroundings, Maps doesn’t have room for marketing material.

Well, that’s changing because Google Business Profile product expert, Krystal Taing, recently shared how businesses could integrate their social media accounts with Business Profiles, adding a digital billboard of sorts for additional engagement (via Search Engine Journal). Google automatically pulls the latest posts from the linked social media accounts and displays them near the bottom under a dedicated section titled Social media updates.

Google support documentation associated with this change explains that business owners can link one account per platform to their Business Profile, and the integration supports linking accounts on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, YouTube, and X (formerly called Twitter). On your business profile, the option to get started is located under Edit profile → Business information → Contact → Social profiles. To link your account, you just need to paste in the URL of your user account.

While this change makes it easier for consumers to identify the businesses they see on social media in the real world, it also gives brands additional screen real estate to market themselves with zero additional effort once the integration is configured. It also means customers can pursue catalogs on a platform they are familiar with, instead of the Business Profile forcing them to use the brand’s website. Moreover, multiple retail locations for the same business can link to the same social media accounts.

Given these advantages, it’s a pity the rollout is gradual, or limited for now, because only a few businesses in a few markets are seeing the option show up on their Google Business Profiles.