Welcome back for Part 4 of our Social Media 8 part series. As Social Media continues to grow and more and more companies jump on the Social Media bandwagon many businesses are realizing that online reviews and online review site are extremely important and can have a huge impact on their bottom line. One of the best of those sites is Yelp and they are the focus of Part 4.
Yelp publishes millions of local business reviews every single day and your best basic strategy with them is, as with all social media sites, is to register your business account with them. Setting up a business account on Yelp is free for everyone and every business. Once set up you can tell the world about your business (location, years in business, etc.), begin to track the amount of users that are viewing your company profile and of course tell people about any sort of promotions or specials that you may be having.
While youre at it you should also consider adding your business to Google Maps, Foursquare, Bing and other similar sites. Frankly the more the merrier when it comes to letting your potential customers know who you are, where you are and what your company can do for them.
Once youve gotten the basics out of the way its time to really start using Yelp to drive people towards your business. Some of the advanced strategies that you can start using on Yelp include adding your companys website URL to your Yelp profile which of course will help lead people directly to you. Uploading a few photos of your company (or yourself) is an excellent idea and will add a huge boost to your trustworthiness in the publics eyes.
Getting proactive is a must with Yelp and other sites like it. If you have good customers, family and friends that have used your services one of the best things you can do is to ask them for their review.
You can go even further by offering premiums or other specials to people that leave reviews. For example, if you are the owner of an auto-repair shop you can offer a free oil change to anyone who leave a great review or, if you have a service company, you can give a discount to anyone who mentions that they found you on Yelp.
So get started, get your reviews going on Yelp and join us back here soon for Part 5.