What is a presence?

A presence refers to a distinct place online where you or your business has a continuing listing or profile.

They can be referred to as listings, profiles and sometimes citations.

A presence usually has information about your business and may allow people to interact by leaving comments, reviews, photos, videos or interacting through likes and shares.

Your presences are likely to be made up of:

• Social Media profiles.  Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest.
• Business Directory profiles. Yelp, Google Business Profile, Hotfrog, BBB.
• Niche Directory profiles. Relevant to your industry.
• Phone and Tablet apps. Apps running on phones and tablets listing your business.
• Database Entries, API's & Profiles from Data Providers.  Data used by 1000's of website, apps and businesses about your business.
• Map place profiles. Google, Bing, Here, Yandex, Yahoo, Apple Maps etc.

It is likely that you have 10's or even hundred's of presences online depending on your location and business type.  

How many are you aware of?

How many of these are you monitoring?

If you are like most businesses it is likely you did not create most of your presences and have no control over most of them.  Many businesses will also be completely unaware they exist on the majority of online services where they have a presence and will be unaware that most of the services exist.

How are Presences created?

In most cases you will not be involved in creating the presences for your business unless you take direct control of this process for a new business.

Business presences are usually created in one of the following ways:

• By the Business Owner. Usually the case for social media accounts.
• By an Agent representing the owner.  A digital marketing company.
• By the service based on Government and Community databases and updates for new and closing businesses.
• By the service by purchasing a database (that may already be out of date).
• By the service through taking data from other places online. Scraping existing data sources.
• By the service manually entering business data from other sources.
• From end users adding your business to a service.
• Through a Data Aggregator or API where your business record exists.