Taking on the social media giant Facebook, Google Maps has reportedly introduced its “Community Feed”, a recent upgradation which Google calls its new feature. A series of updates comprising posts from a local area, the feed has been organized as any other vertically scrollable news feed where posts can be liked by hitting on a little thumbs-up icon.

Through the last few years, Google Maps has updated several features that enable users to follow enterprises and message them directly in the app, as allowed by Facebook and its Messenger. Additionally, businesses are also enabled to set up their own profile in Google Maps by using a short name, a logo, and a cover photo, another feature showing much similarity to what is being provided by Facebook Pages.

Although, businesses could earlier make posts via Google’s tools, they had to specifically tap on a business’s profile for receiving their updates. With the upgraded feature, this same category of posts could reach to even those users of Google Maps who have not taken any extra step of following a particular enterprise.

According to Google, such increased exposure would help in improving the number of post views. This has been reportedly witnessed by the tech giant during initial tests of the Community Feed before its public launch.

Further, the feed has been provided with an Explore tab for making it convenient to track the latest recommendations, news, and updates from trusted local sources. These also comprise the posts created through Google My Business for notifying consumers regarding new offers, new deals, menu updates, and others. At the launch, Google declared that its focus would be on underscoring posts from food and drink enterprises.

Along with posts from enterprises, the Community Feed will also show content posted by Google users as well as recent reviews from Google’s Local Guides, the company’s volunteer program, where users share their knowledge about local places for receiving perks like early access to Google features, profile badges, and more.

Source credit: https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/01/google-maps-takes-on-facebook-with-its-own-news-feed/