What’s for lunch? Check Yelp
Posted on May 26, 2010 in Social Media in Wichita Kansas by JuggleMedia
mobile, Wichita Social Media, Yelp
One of the most popular ratings sites on the internet, Yelp is an amazing place to find out all sorts of information about a particular business, yet is being underutilized currently in Wichita. For example, I can see what’s around me and the top restaurants in Wichita. It’s a great place to see what others are saying about the place I’m heading to for lunch. What kind of food, how’s the service and if it’s affordable.
As a tool for a person, Yelp gives me all sorts of sweet stats. I want to see what others are saying about a place and why I should go there, it’ll give me that too. Great stuff for me to consider as I head out the door to lunch in a few.
What’s NOT good about Yelp for a business is that fact that you REALLY have to be careful and monitor comments. It isn’t limited to just restaurants either. Retail store and other businesses can really benefit or be hurt by what’s said online via Yelp.
Now, the good thing for a smaller town like Wichita is that Yelp isn’t a mainstream site…yet. As the popularity grows and more and more people shift their communication online like the rest of the world, so too will the amount of information on Yelp. This is proven by the relatively small number of comments for the local businesses listed in Wichita. The top Wichita spot has under 20 reviews whereas the top spot in San Fransisco has 2,048 reviews. That’s a wide range!
My recommendation is to set up a daily update using SocialMention.com. It’ll send you an email each day just to make sure your business is covered. This is the bare-minimum step to monitoring any of the online chatter about your business.
Better yet, start using Yelp yourself. Of course, maybe not for your own business by posting a bunch of reviews about your place (that’s cheating) but using your mobile phone, you can rate other places. The more people that use Yelp, the better the service and long-term results.
I’d also recommend that you promote that you want feedback via Yelp. Sometimes it can be VERY difficult to receive, but ultimately you can build a better business based off of some of the constructive feedback you may receive. It’s like putting yourself out there for a long-term, always-open survey of your business. Scary, but at least your customers can hold you accountable.
The only way to combat bad reviews on Yelp is to address the problem, solve it and hope for more reviews. Here’s the problem, humans like to whine about negative things MORE than we like to boast about the positive things. Therefore, you really have to ensure you are providing an excellent service ALL THE TIME instead of “sometime.” Make sense?
If you need more help on this stuff, give us a buzz! 316-747-9266.
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