Is your business open late for the holiday shopping bonanza? Do you have special opening times on the weekend? How do you communicate that to potential customers?

I hope you didn’t just say, “Oh, we put a sign on the door.”

With 257 million people looking, shopping and engaging with the world through their smartphone, you’ve got to have a way to communicate your special opening and closing times digitally. Plus, you don’t want to have any disgruntled customers leave a bad review online because they didn’t know that you were closing early for the holiday.

If you have a Facebook page (which you should, as its growing in prominence as a search engine) you can log into your business page’s settings and edit your business’s hours. Be sure to save your changes. Then be sure to create a post on your timeline (preferably a cute, holiday-themed but on-brand graphic) saying that you updated your hours for the season. You might consider changing your cover photo to a graphic with the updated hours. Pro tip: set yourself a calendar reminder to change the hours back and remove that cover photo when the holiday is over.

Hopefully you’ve claimed your Google Business Listing. (If not, we’ll teach you how on another post.) If you have, be sure to log in and change your hours there, as Google is the largest search engine in the world! You definitely don’t want to miss those people! If you’re using the Google My Business app, select the “Profile” button at the bottom, and go to “Overview” along the top bar. Scroll down to find the “Special Hours” section. Here you can add specific days and times that you’re open or closed, and you won’t need to remember to go back and change it back after Christmas! For example, say you’re opening early every Saturday in December, you can select each Saturday on the calendar and put the open and close times in for each. The special hours will supersede the normal hours.

So don’t get left out of the “special holiday hours” trend! Update your times digitally and start selling!

P.S. - You should also put a sign on the door. ;-)