The Facts About Yelp for Small Businesses

Yelp tends to be the primary go-to site for people wanting reviews on businesses. Whether your business is on Yelp as a form of online reputation management or simply because that’s where your customers/potential customers hang out, it’s important to understand the facts about Yelp.

So, it’s time to get the facts straight:

1. Most of its traffic is from its homepage
2. Restaurants aren’t the biggest category
3. Encouraging customers to post reviews is a bad idea
4. Those “People Love Us on Yelp” stickers? You’ve gotta earn them
5. Yelp provides free signage via Flickr
6. Yelp has paid for reviews in the past
7. Customer service appears to have a strong effect on reviews
8. Every star in a review leads to a 5-9% jump in revenues
9. Yelp tends to favor independent businesses over chains
10. Business owners can dispute reviews on Yelp
11. Legal threats for bad reviews can trigger “The Streisand Effect”

To read more details, check out this post on Mashable.

There are two points on this list that I found surprising. One being that restaurants aren’t the biggest category but that shopping is. The second point that I found surprising was that encouraging reviews is considered a bad idea. Yelp actually discourages against this practice. Rather than consumers potentially feeling as though they are being used in a promotional means, Yelps prefers the reviews happen organically and not because of any form of coercion.

What Yelp fact were you not aware of?

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Intercept Bad Reviews Before Broadcasted Online

Have you ever had an experience at a business establishment where you wished you could voice your concerns to the manager but not in a confrontational kind of way?

TalkToTheManager might just have the answer!

While listening to The Social Hour podcast, TalkToTheManager was featured as an interesting service to check out. It is described as a way for customers to give anonymous feedback/comments to business owners/managers via text message. The business owners then have the ability to respond in order to address customer service, product, and facility issues before a bad experience becomes a bad online review.

Benefits for the businesses include:

• Managers’ personal cell phone numbers stay private
• Discover issues you didn’t know existed
• Turn off messages temporarily whenever you like
• Comments and responses can go to multiple managers

This service is intended to intercept a bad review before it is broadcasted online. I think this concept could actually work too. People want to be heard and this may provide the instant acknowledgement and response that is desired by customers. The goal is, if handled appropriately, the review that is eventually posted online turns out to be portrayed in a more positive light.

For me, it doesn’t have to be just about bad service either. I am more than happy to share a positive experience with a manager as well.

How could your business make use of this service?

Like this post? Connect with Erika Barbosa on Google+.

Image credit: Johan Larsson