Yelp, the consumer review/experiencing site continues to grow and expand its services to the small business owner community. As a small business owner, tracking and monitor online activities continues to be a challenge with limited resources available within the company.
Identifying and maintaining an active presence on the sites where your customers are spending their time is imperative to remain competitive. If someone is talking about you, you need to know about it.
Yelp continues to grow, reporting over 32 million people visited their site in May. They have become a trusted site where consumers can go and share their experiences about a business and those experiences and ratings are taken into consideration by other consumers. People visiting from out of town looking for a specific cuisine, a coffee shop with free wifi head on over to Yelp, people looking for more information about a company before they hire them are seeing what others have to say about the company. It is a very viable resource that small business owners should look at and become a part of.
Yelp Business Tools
As a business owner, once you have claimed your listing, you will receive your weekly statistics:
- Page Views
- Number of Reviews
- Number of Bookmarks
- Views of Posted Announcements
- Number of User Photos Added
These statistics provide a glimpse into how many users are finding your listing on Yelp and are interacting with your page. While this is great it was missing a very big part of online consumer activity. The smart phones! We are not always in front of a computer when we are seeking a specific restaurant especially when we are making a last minute decision. We go to the phone. The business tools were lacking in this area … until now.
Yelp Mobile Stats Tracking & Reporting
Yelp has announced that in addition to the business tools reporting, that they now are tracking the mobile statistics. This is a big step as more and more we are finding that consumers are using their smart phones and not a computer when it comes to a quick business look-up.
According to Luther, via the Yelp blog,
Just over 1 in 4 searches on Yelp are performed from our popular iPhone application.
Even more thrilling: every five seconds someone uses the Yelp app to call a local business.
Yelp will be adding the mobile stats to your weekly business tools report as a separate section via the Yelp app:
- Page views
- Calls to your business
- Number of people who requested directions to your business
- Number of check-ins to your business
Yelp is more than a customer review/experience sharing site. As a claimed business with a business account, you are able to reply pubically or privately to each review, see who your customers are that have posted a review, where they are from and how they found you.
Establishing and maintaining an online presence for a small business owner is becoming more and more an essential part of marketing your business. Appearing high atop in local searches via local directories, Google Places, Bing Local Listing Center, Merchant Circle, Yellowpages.com or the various others that are available, is what helps to get a company noticed. This is not to say go and sign up for all of them as then you are competing for a first page result against the local directories.
Yelp is headed in the right direction in providing the mobile stats. As more and more people adopt the smart phones and exploring the apps available to them, the more we will be seeing this type of reporting.
Have you claimed your listing on Yelp? If not take a look into it and see if it is a good place for you and your business. It is very easy to add your listing to Yelp and start taking advantage of the business tools.
photo credits: Joshua Kaufman, Yelp blog