Markee secures location presence in the world of Apple
In January, Apple launched its Apple Business Connect app, giving more weight to its Apple Maps service. With the launch, businesses now have new and improved influence over how their information is displayed in the Apple Maps location map and other Apple apps.
A separate account with Apple Business Connect is required to manually maintain data.
However, not for Markee users: thanks to our partnership with yext, Apple Business Connect integrates perfectly with existing listing products via API integration and is already live and activated for you. As usual with all API connections, data is updated in real time, and in addition to standard data as name, address and phone number, data such as payment methods and gallery photos can also be synchronized simultaneously.
The API connection to Apple is available immediately to all Markee locations with an active listing license. The following fields will sync from Markee to the Apple profile:
• Name
• Address
• Phone number
• External URL
• Opening hours, holiday hours, temporarily closed
• Payment methods
For error-free display in the profiles, Apple has some requirements for the data submitted. These include the following:
• Entries in the categories restaurants, food, shopping must be open on at least four different days of the week in order to be synchronized with Apple.
• Valid categories and a phone number are required, and the address provided must be complete and not hidden.
• Gallery photos and company logo must have a minimum size of 700 pixels at the shortest point.
• Webpage URLs must not contain UTM parameters.
• Apple allows a maximum of 20 characters as additional address information.
• Location names must be alphanumeric and not just numeric.
• Site names may be a maximum of 255 characters and must be at least 2 characters long.
What’s behind Apple Business Connect
Apple’s brand new tool allows businesses of any size to claim ownership of their location data on Apple Maps and maintain the data independently. This ensures the correct display of key business information across all apps from the Apple world. Through Apple Maps, Messages, Wallet and Siri, more than one billion users are reached and provided with up-to-date location data as potential customers and clients, according to Apple.
Further options such as the optimization of the digital presence through showcases and a social posting function have so far been announced by Apple for companies in the US-market. We expect this also in Europe soon.