Why Yelp.com Can Be A Business Owners Best Friend
Being the selfless and diligent worker that I am, I can’t help but crack a smile when someone compliments the work my company performs. Call it pride or call it vanity, but I love it. Compliments energize me and the people I work with, and the benefits don’t stop there. Compliments from satisfied customers also help us sell our services. So, when we get a good compliment, we really like to publicize it on our website.
But like everything else, praise needs to be transparent to be truly effective. When someone says something nice to you on your birthday, do you wonder if the compliment was sincere? While the compliment might be genuine, it might also be someone being nice “because it’s your birthday.” For the same reasons, it’s hard to give testimonials on a company website a lot of weight. While they might be correct, how can we really trust a nice compliment we find on a company website? Yelp.com is a website that can help address this issue.
What Yelp.com is: A website that people can use to find and review businesses. People can review everything from their favorite coffee shop to their neighborhood doctor. Yelp is more than “just a review site,” however. There’s also a social network feature where individuals can compare their reviews, email each other, etc. Yelp is especially popular for reviewing restaurants, but it’s becoming more and more common to see reviews for every type of business on the site.
Why Yelp.com is important: Yelp is growing more popular with every second. QuantCast.com, which ranks website popularity, states that the site has almost doubled its traffic in the months between October 2008 and March 2009 (that’s 5.9 million visitors in March 2009 alone). Need I say more?
Why Yelp.com will continue to grow: The best thing about Yelp is the social network. When people come to Yelp to find business reviews, they also have the opportunity to evaluate the reviewers themselves. Visitors can find out “Does the person who left this review seem like someone I would trust? Do they like the same things I do?” Yelp’s strength is that visitors can evaluate both businesses AND the people who review them.
How your business can benefit from Yelp.com: How about using Yelp for free advertising? Setup a profile for your business for free, then encourage your customers to leave you a positive review. A good profile and positive reviews will drive customers to your business.
How Yelp.com can hurt your business: Bad reviews. Yelp doesn’t moderate any of the reviews they receive. If an upset customer(s) leaves a bad review for your business, you have to live with it. Yelp will allow you to respond to bad comments (which is better than not responding), but once the bad review is placed the damage is done. When you respond to a bad review, the best course of action is to “kill them with kindness” and freely admit any mistakes you or your company may have made.
Now that you know the low down on Yelp.com, it’s time to get started on your company’s Yelp profile.
