Yelp
How to Use Yelp & Online Review Sites
How to Use Yelp for Business
Yelp Case Studies

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.

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.

 

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