Automated Scheduling Google My Business Posts

(This post is more than half a decade old. I’m guessing some of it is outdated by now.)

I won’t tell you much about Google My Business posts and how they’re potentially great for your business, your business’s SEO and your company’s findability. Because other people have already written about that. (Lie. I later wrote this post about GMB posts: What and Why?)

Instead, I’ll help you figure out how to pre-schedule several posts at once.

Wouldn’t it be nice if Google My Business allowed us to schedule future posts? Yeah. That would be nice, Dan. Until that happens, you have a few options.

In no particular order:

Yext allows users to schedule GMB posts. I have never used Yext. I don’t know exactly how much it costs, but I’ve heard rumors of $500/yr and up. I don’t know which of their plans include GMB automation, and they don’t list pricing for any of them, so, you’ll have to contact them for more info.

Sendible lets you schedule GMB posts. I haven’t used Sendible either. Sendible starts at ~$300/yr, and that includes automating your future GMB posts.

Do you use WordPress?

At least a couple WordPress plugins empower you to easily create and auto-publish Google My Business posts. I’ll highlight two of them.

WP Google My Business Auto Publish is 100% free. $0. If you use it, change the default plugin settings so that it does not publish all posts to GMB automatically. …Unless that’s something you want. (Lazy?) Update: This plugin slows down the backend of WP. It also auto-publishes GMB posts for every existing page you update or edit. I don’t recommend it, unless you’re really lazy and/or cheap. Update 2: An astute reader pointed out that you don’t need to have this plugin set to auto-post, which would solve some of the annoyances. But as this is an article about how to automate GMB posts, using this plugin without the auto-posting feature is, um, yeah. #DefeatsThePurpose Also, about my first recommendation above regarding changing the settings, apparently it either posts every time you update anything, (so much noise) or not at all. No middle ground. Pass on this one unless your criteria are significantly different than mine.

Post to Google My Business is by an outfit called Tycoon Media, but that old-school-ritz name isn’t the only reason I think this one is not free. Something on their website mentioned needing their $80/yr plan to support “Post scheduling”.

I’ve used the gregariously named ‘WP Google My Business Auto Publish’ on a few sites. If I use it again, I’d take a couple hours to customize and finagle things so that every page-edit didn’t trigger a new GMB post. I’d also add a checkbox for when I actually want a blog post to be turned into a GMB post.  I just can’t wrap my head around a good, dual-purpose blog post/Google My Biz post. …They seem like two entirely different things to me, and I would try to squeeze that delineation out of the plugin. Or maybe I’ll make my own.

Schedule Google My Business Posts Now

Anyhow, there you have it. Several decent-ish options to automate and schedule Google My Business posts. And if you’re not going to take the time to login to GMB once a week to publish a post, you should probably pick one.

In case you’re wondering, Hootsuite doesn’t help here. They’ve known for more than a year that Hootsuite users want GMB post automation. Hootsuite doesn’t seem to care.

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Dan Dreifort consults on SEO and UX. He just joined veteran San Diego experimental-punky-prog-horror-garage-noise band Gurtrudestein, and he’s jazzed about that. …Except for the fact that if you accidentally spell it with an “e” instead of a “u” the band is invisible on Google. (Regardless of how many helper words you use). Thanks, Gertrude Stein.