Yelp Reviews for the Wreck of the Salty Dog

When co-founders Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons conjured up the thought for Yelp during a startups incubator four years agone, they didn't remember people would intendance to review businesses. Now Yelp is one of the most popular online customer review sites. It'south succeeded in translating word-of-oral fissure to the World Broad Web and has transformed the mode people collaborate with businesses.

The site tin exist a great way for entrepreneurs to promote their business concern. Since anyone tin enter a business on Yelp, it'southward a adept idea for business owners to check out the site and see what's there.

Yelp was launched in 2004 in San Francisco and now covers the unabridged Usa. Information technology includes every type of business organisation imaginable. Users rate a business organization' services on a one- to v-star rating organisation. Eighty-five percent of all its reviews are iii stars or higher with 67 percentage rating at four or five stars, so for the bulk of businesses the feedback is good. For businesses with reviews that seem a lilliputian lackluster, there are tricks to boosting your star rating.

Getting Started on Yelp

Stoppelman, Yelp's CEO, gives the following tips for business concern owners to set and manage their Yelp concern page:

1. Get set up on Yelp. Anyone can look up any business on Yelp in the U.S. and write a review, for costless. Anyone tin can add a business. A new concern list is confirmed through a phone verification system. When a listing is added, a telephone number is associated with your business. The system will call that number, then requite y'all a code to verify y'all're the business organization owner. Subsequently claiming your folio y'all can begin to receive eastward-mail alerts when people review your concern. Yous're besides able to meet how many people take viewed your page and respond straight to reviewers in an e-mail.
2. Get gear up on Yelp for Concern Owners . "We wanted to bring businesses into the fold, into conversations that are happening every day," Stoppelman says. Prior to Yelp for Business concern Owners, which launched in April, business owners would sometimes sign up every bit regular Yelp users in order to attain out to reviewers, whether to give thanks them for a positive review or address a negative 1. "We knew that was happening, and then we wanted to make it more formal and make it more than clear for the consumer," Stoppelman says.
3. Manage your reviews. If you think a review may violate guidelines, it can be reported and removed. If it'south a case of an angry customer and the business possessor knows what the situation is and what happened, Stoppelman recommends messaging that user. "Talk nigh that state of affairs, deal with it caput on. If the person ends upward being happy, they can update their review."
4. Business owners can privately e-mail service each reviewer. But as part of a congenital-in spam prevention tool, they're immune to send only 1 e-post to each reviewer until that reviewer writes dorsum. And so they're immune to send 1 more than east-mail service, and so on, giving the consumer the power to make up one's mind whether they want to receive letters. Reviewers can also cake a business from due east-mailing them in instance they care to write a respond to that business organization merely prefer not to be contacted again.
5. Never sign on under another name to comment on your Yelp folio. You lot tin hazard your business concern'southward reputation two ways: by posting glowing reviews of your own business concern under an assumed name and by publicly replying to reviews--peculiarly negative ones--on your Yelp folio. In fact, one of the goals of the Yelp for Business Owners site was to aid curb people's want to immediately respond to reviews straight on their page past assuasive the business organisation owner to send an electronic mail privately to a reviewer.

"Consumers practice need to come showtime. If they're not comfy sharing, then the site stops working . . . if someone can make a snarky comment dorsum at you, that might have a shouting down consequence. It doesn't reverberate well on a business concern either," Stoppelman says.

In whatsoever public review forum, there'southward a chance that an audience could be misled by false reviews. Yelp mitigates that by giving reviewers identity. Those with the best reviews are rated past other users and additional into the Yelp Elite Team.

Manage Your Reviews, Both Positive and Negative

"We're anchored by real people. Anyone tin can click through and see who they are and encounter how many reviews they've written," says Stephanie Ichinose, Yelp's communications director. "That transparency helps the community understand who's talking nearly the business and how much we should value that particular stance. And at that place are a lot of faceless reviews; information technology goes in both means."

Rather than exist alarmed by negative reviews, Ichinose recommends a business owner read reviews in the same fashion a consumer would read them.

"Look at them in aggregate. Have a step back and run across if there are any trends," Ichinose says.

If there are trends that point out something negative--Ichinose gives the common complaint of loud music playing in a business organization as an case--that'southward when to take action to remedy the situation in your concern.

Based on Experience

For Annie Decamp, owner of Palo Alto, California-based jewelry business Decamp, tracking her page led her to discover a whopping 8 percent of her sales come from Yelp. That realization acquired her to advertise on Yelp in order to become the extras--a link to the Decamp website on her business's Yelp page and a rotating slideshow of photographs instead of a static one.

Simply for her, it took some experimenting until she found a Yelp subscription she was comfortable with. She signed up for a pricier package simply decided to cutting back to a lower-cost 1 in February.

"I would recommend starting with the lowest one. Pay attention and track information technology for awhile and know how many people are using information technology," Decamp says.

She recommends starting a customer mailing listing, and promoting your Yelp folio at that place as well as in newsletters. "It'll say, 'We're now reviewed on Yelp,' or 'Please review me on Yelp.'"

She and her employees also inquire callers where they heard about Decamp. "A lot of times they'll say Yelp," Decamp says. "I remember of everything in a marketing sense, so I demand to understand where customers are coming from and I demand to know what I'm paying for."

Decamp follows through by contacting everyone who'due south reviewed her business concern with a thank-you east-post.

"It's a very personal site. The people that I don't know--I recollect that's a actually big thing for them to take the time to practice that."

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Source: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/197278

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