Yelp To Help Your Business
If you are unfamiliar with Yelp.com, as I imagine many people are, given the percentage of times I tell someone I am an Elite Yelper and they say, “What’s that?,” it is time to get familiar.
On March 2, 2012, Yelp hosted their IPO with shares closing at $15 a share, 64% higher than anticipated. Nearly 6 million people use Yelp’s mobile app to find businesses near to them and 66 million unique users visit the website per month. Some of the top Yelp communities in America are in San Francisco (where it was founded), L.A., New York, and Austin (of course!).
Why is this important to you? If you are a small business owner, Yelp can be used to add value to your business by leveraging social strategies to increase visibility of your business in your community. That is, unless you have poor customer service or are peddling a poor product, then Yelp can be your worst enemy. Let’s assume you have a nice small business, be it a restaurant or food trailer, day spa, clothing store, salon, day care, gym, or what-have-you.
Why Yelp is Good for Your Awesome Small Business:
1. Yelp is Mobile
Both dedicated and casual Yelpers look up businesses on the mobile app. I found it especially useful when traveling since the app allows you to look for places meeting your criteria within a certain distance (2 blocks, 6 blocks, etc). One author called this “enabling hyper local neighborhood searches” and this is the reason that many people prefer Yelp for local business searches to Google. Yelp’s directions to your business are also superior to any I have seen on the web or on apps. In New York, it even told me which subway to take since I was on foot. That’s pretty cool.
66 million users per month and growing 80% per year. Mm-hmm, people trust Yelp.
