Have You Used Twitter For Google My Business Support?

[MiriamEllis]

Hey Everybody!

If you've been doing Local for some years, chances are, you remember those dark days in the past when there was zero Google local support. You could post something in their forum, but that was pretty much your only hope. It was an absolutely amazing day when they finally rolled out phone support, and I'm still very grateful that this exists, but just this week, I learned about another way to contact support.

Joy Hawkins has surfaced a Twitter account you can tweet when in need of assistance and she says its not only really fast, but that the help is US-based (which would be great for US users).

I'd never heard of this before and wondered if any of you have tried it, and what response times and overall satisfaction you experienced with it. If you've not tried it yet and are experiencing a local client conundrum, maybe give it a try and let our community here know how it went?

[MiriamEllis]

Hey There!

I really appreciate you coming back to update this thread with your experience. So, that's really good to note that someone noticed your company Twitter. Good to know! And sure, you don't want to abuse the account, but it sounds like you've now got a new resource that could be handy in a variety of situations. Neat development!

[VERBInteractive]

A follow-up, https://twitter.com/GoogleSmallBiz saw this conversation and reached out to our company twitter account (my original request came from my personal account, I think our company twitter has a bit more weight) and they were very quick at resolving the issue. I don't want to abuse the account, but I'm tempted to put all of my odd/weird request through them since, as mentioned, anything out of the normal seems to confuse the call center. And that is the only time I need to reach out to them.

One thing to note, they requested I DM them.

[MiriamEllis]

Hmm, that's too bad that you haven't rec'd a response in 24 hours. And your experience with phone support sounds typical - some staff are very good, but others don't seem to have equal training. Frustrating.

On Google dedicated reps, I have wondered if they might go that way if they fully implement Home Service Ads in Local, but, I'm not holding my breath. It would be awesome if they did!

[VERBInteractive]

Morning Miriam,

24 hours since I tweeted, no response yet. I'm still leaning towards getting the calls back. Although I dealt with the call center twice yesterday and the first person was awesome (pin not showing to a client in Dominican Republic so pretty standard request), the second person never did get what I was asking and kept repeating the same answer over and over.

I'm going to continue to monitor and will report back when if I hear more.

Any idea if GMB will take a representative model for legitimate agencies that offer local services? I would love to have one contact to call when I bring a client on board and deal with firming up their GMB visibility. I have brought it up with a few people at the call center, one guy hinted at it, but wouldn't say anything official.

[Moz.HelpTeam]

(This is Miriam, but I'm in Mozzer Alliance right now)

Oh, super! Looking forward to hearing how it goes. Good luck!

[VERBInteractive]

Hi Miriam,

Thanks for the heads up about this account. I was unaware of this and am in the process of trying it out myself. We had the previous name of the hotel resurface as one and are trying to get it marked closed again. The only issue I can see is explaining a complicated issue a tweet (although it might help trim out the "fat" of the request)

I have had varying success requesting a call back for support, although with any complicated issue, there is a lot more back and forth then I would like.

I will report back when I heard more.

[MiriamEllis]

Good Morning, Peter!

Thanks so much for sharing your experience, and that's a great example from the Webmaster Help Forum. I agree with you that the voluntary support in Google's forum is kind of an extraordinary thing. On the one hand, it has proved an excellent training ground for Local SEOs who have become TCs and have gained extra knowledge of common problems with the local products. On the other hand, it sort of abets Google in not having to staff Local as they probably should.

It will be nice if someone give the Twitter option a try and shares with us how it went!

[Mobilio]

I didn't use GMB in Twitter but i have some issue with AdWords. And GAW Twitter account was very useful for me answering me exactly what i need. And even they answer me for other questions in DM.

Overall their support forum strange since in 99% of cases you receive help from non-employees and some of answers are not very useful at all. Of course there are spectacular examples where someone receive help from employees:
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/webmasters/R0MGhtF3IDs/6UghGfcXCAAJ
but they're rare. Very rare.

Their phone support is IVR (interactive voice response), their mail support was scaled with AI (i can't find article but i read in past someone complaining about that with case of Nexus ordering and epic mail correspondence with them). So we shouldn't scary that Joy trying their Twitter for helping.