Help! What in the World is Yelp?

Yelp is a one-stop shop for quality customer reviews about every type of business. The website strives to “connect people with great businesses based on customer reviews.” With more than 78 million unique visitors per month, the website caters to desktop, local and mobile consumers worldwide. More than 12 million users sign into their Yelp account through the Facebook application and more than 5 million users are on Android Smartphones. The user interface is friendly on nearly any device.

A great feature on the Yelp website is how reviewers post photos of the business and link it to the review page as well as the business’ photo album on the profile page. It truly brings the property to life with current, unedited photos from real people. In the example below, you can see how the reviewer posted 17 photos and when you click on her photos, it takes you to the photo album on the business profile and displays photos from other visitors as well. It has an excellent social interface and truly accomplishes what Yelp strives to do. Take a look at how detailed and lengthy the customer reviews are. You are definitely seeing quality reviews with useful content and feedback!

For the competitive social user, Yelp has a fun feature with its royalty titles reviewers earn for being a frequent visitor. Foursquare has a similar feature, but Yelp goes in depth with the titles, ranging from baron of the neighborhood to King of the City. It encourages frequent reviews and repeat usage- not to mention bragging rights to share on Facebook or Twitter. If the royalty ratings don’t appeal to you, the badges and deals may entice you to start checking in and posting reviews.

From a business perspective, Yelp isn’t just a review website. It’s an excellent resource for business owners to research competition and communicate with customers. Business owners can unlock their free business account and communicate with customers privately or publicly. They can also upload photos like the other social review sites.

Here’s a snapshot of what customers see when they search for your location and land on your business page.

Yelp recently partnered up with Microsoft's search engine Bing to blend Yelp reviews into local search results. The review snippets show up on the side of the Bing search engine, offering instant opinions without jumping around websites. Feel free to explore the Yelp and Microsoft partnership a little further with this article from PCMag.com.You can unlock your free business page in less than 5 minutes at the following link: Unlock Your Free Yelp Account.

RezStream Hospitality Tips: Yelp

  • Claim your free business page on Yelp
  • Add as much information to the listing as possible i.e name, phone number, website, physical address and a geo-targeted description to localize the listing
  • Encourage reviews and images to be added
  • Address negative posts