What's New in Local Search for January 2016

Once a month our in-house local expert, Mary Bowling, hands us her take on what's changed in the local search industry over the last 30 days. It started out as an in-house memo and has been upgraded to the lead post within our local search updates. Let's jump straight in and see "What's New in Local Search" for January 2016.

• If you haven't gotten the news yet, Mike Blumenthal reminds us to stop wasting time and resources on Google+. This is something that brands and agencies are really struggling with. Many of them have been encouraging and coaching clients or location operators to use Google+, so they are embarrassed to now tell them otherwise. However, the same Google that bet the farm on Plus has been dismantling it at a frantic pace that has accelerated over the past 3-4 months. It no longer has any effect on Local.

• Bing adds Fact Answers to the top of some search results. So if you search for business name phone, for example, you'll see that answer first in your search results. You can also ask for things like hours, address, directions and reviews. This is still rolling out - not everyone has it, yet, and more of these types of facts are likely to be added in the future.

  

• Mark John Hiemstra provides excellent advice on marketing your events here.

• Facebook steams towards many of the things Google tried to do with Plus and couldn't get much adoption for. And it's rolling these things out quite quickly. Now, Facebook has beefed up its Page Plugin that makes it possible to subscribe to events and integrate messenger chats from the page.

• As part of its dismantling of Plus, Google removes reviews from Googl...