You may be on Yelp already. You may have heard about Yelp but aren’t on there yet. Or maybe you’ve never heard of Yelp! So let’s go over a little background just in case you need to know.
In 2004, Yelp was founded in an effort to help people find local businesses. In the 4thquarter of 2014, Yelp had an average of approximately 135 million monthly visitors. Now that’s progress! There have been over 71 million local reviews published on Yelp. So it’s clear to see that people are on Yelp, promoting their services, writing reviews, and looking for the best businesses out there.
Yelp is a way to get the word out on your business. As mentioned there are millions of monthly visitors. When you strategize properly by doing a thorough, informative company description, coupled with pictures (if pictures add value to your service) you will be, more or less, getting free advertising, as it is free to set up a Yelp account. It should be noted there are paid advertisements you can take part in, but that is entirely up to you.
As mentioned, Yelp is a site for company promotion and company reviews. This can be good but can also be viewed as negative. Sure, when those sparkling reviews come in, fantastic! You can use those for promotional purposes. But like any business, there may be the occasional (hopefully just occasional) bad review. This is what the social media world is all about – people having an opportunity to state their opinion. If you receive a negative review, you respond calmly, incorporate changes if need be and move on. If you decide to join Yelp you want to consider this.
All in all, Yelp can be a great source of promotion to showcase your company, along with potentially excellent reviews by satisfied customers. And that can certainly help you build your business. One tip – if you have a great review on Yelp you can link back to the review on your other social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
So the choice of yours – which way will you go – to Yelp or not to Yelp? That is the question!