Overton Chamber Helping Locals With Online Presence

The Livingston-Overton County Chamber of Commerce is helping local businesses increase their online visibility.

CEO Shannon Cantrell said they recently updated their website so that any business in the area with a Google Business Profile is automatically featured there. Cantrell said the system makes it much easier for visitors to discover all the things Overton County has to offer.

“As long as their Google business page is set up correctly, all they have to do as far as a visitor is click on one of these links and it’ll go straight out to their website, the business’s website,” Cantrell said. “So they can book straight from ours, which is very handy.”

Cantrell said their system automatically adds a business’s events from Facebook, Google, or Eventbrite to the calendar on the chamber’s website. Cantrell said any local business can reach out to the chamber and set up a time to get individual help creating their own Google Business Profile.

“One of our goals from the start was to create a comprehensive event calendar that pulled events automatically instead of us at the chamber constantly having to search them out and add them to our calendar manually,” Cantrell said.

Cantrell said the chamber is also planning to start a Google business training workshop series in the near future.

“I would love to try to have one by the end of the year,” Cantrell said. “And I’m hoping maybe mid-October, worst case scenario first part of November. But it will definitely be a regular part of the calendar for 2025.”

Cantrell said few businesses have reached out to them for assistance so far because the service is so new.

“We didn’t get these plugins until maybe, it’s probably been a month ago,” Cantrell said. “And we have been working behind the scenes to make sure all of our chamber members were put in there correctly because there’s some special things about the website that caters to our chamber members, obviously.”