Yelp & Online Review Sites for Business
What It Is
Review or ratings sites allow customers to share their positive—and negative—opinions about local businesses; the most popular sites include Yelp; TripAdvisor; and CitySearch and InsiderPages (these two are owned by the same company and share content back and forth). Yahoo! Local and GoogleMaps also have incorporated ratings functionality; not only do they allow users to post reviews, they also aggregate ratings from the other online review sites.
Here’s what you need to know about review sites: Your business is probably already listed on one or all of them—even if you don’t know it. Anyone (yes, anyone) can create a review page for your business, so users can start writing glowing or scathing reviews without your knowledge, so it’s important to get actively involved in monitoring these sites.
As a business owner, you can get free access to your page and enhance your listing with photos, details, special offers, and more. But you cannot edit or alter the actual reviews.
What It Does
From a user perspective, the benefit of review sites is that they offer (theoretically) unbiased reviews about competing businesses in the immediate area. Business owners naturally tend to have a love-hate relationship with them. Since the sites operate as virtual word-of-mouth, the reviews can have a significant impact on the businesses’ revenue and reputation. Yelp, the biggest ratings site by far, distinguishes itself by its “filtering” process, in which it attempts to display only the most trusted ratings. (In other words, it tries to get rid of biased reviews that either praise or trash the business unfairly.) Here’s how it works, according to Yelp:
Ratings sites offer a significant opportunity for local businesses. At a minimum, you can get an idea of how well you’re meeting your customers' needs. (If you have 53 reviews complaining about your customer service, you should probably do something about it.)
More importantly, ratings sites give you the opportunity to directly connect with customers. You can comment on customer reviews either publicly. You can offer them special deals—and send them out via Twitter and Facebook. And you can leverage location-based sites, that allow users to check-in at your business.
Who It’s For
Retail, hospitality, restaurants, theaters, service businesses (lawyers, realtors, contractors), and other bricks-and-mortar businesses, as well as tourism-related destinations such as museums.
Here are additional resources on using Yelp and other ratings sites for your business.
PowerUp Recommends
Articles
- Can They Really Say that About my Hotel? - CDG Interactive blog
- Yelp Reviews: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly - The SocialLatte
- Yelp Increases Transparency; Shows Off Citysearch Goggles - The Next Web
- How Small Businesses Can Make the Most of Yelp - ReadWriteBiz
- Trip Advisor Says Google Won’t Stop Using its Content - Wall Street Journal
Resources
- How Reviews Flow Around the Web - Two Octobers
- Yelp for Business: Get Started - Yelp
- Top 10 Things You Should Know About Yelp - Yelp
- Owners Center: Trip Advisor - TripAdvisor
What you need to know about Online Review Sites
Our 3 Likes
- A positive customer review is the most powerful endorsement you can get.
- Deals & special offers can encourage customer loyalty.
- You can use customer feedback to improve your business
Our 3 Dislikes
- They tend to attract extreme opinions (overly negative or highly positive)
- Some reviewers may have an agenda. There's nothing preventing competitors from writing reviews about you.
- It can be tough to overcome the impact of unfair reviews
3 things to do right now
- Claim your page on each review site
- Edit them for accuracy. Verify that your contact information, hours, etc. are correct
- Read your reviews. Respond, diplomatically, to complaints and/or negative reviews.
Social Media Pyramid
Your Recommended Allowance of Social Media
Consult the Social Media Pyramid to find out which social media channels you should be using, and how much time you should be spending on each.