I Yelp, You Yelp, we All Yelp for Business

                                             

To continue adding on to the list of social networking sites that Chelsie Schmitz is unfamiliar with, I ventured in to the world of Yelp. As someone who moved away to a completely new area for the summer, I found Yelp one of the most helpful sites. I was able to find new and exciting places to eat, quality places to get my hair trimmed during the summer months, what kind of grocery stores were available and the numerous attractions in Dubuque, Iowa for when I get off work from my internship.

 

Yelp impressed me that it was built for small businesses to gain recognition and visibility within the business world. It reminded me a lot of the yellow pages you typically find in phone books, but a more interactive version. After doing some research, a lot of Yelp’s competitors are Angie’s List, Groupon, LivingSocial and Yahoo Local. Yelp generates revenue by advertising local businesses in the area and also by facilitating restaurant, hotel and airline ticket reservations through the site.

One of the interesting aspects Yelp has are the “Yelp Deals”. Every week, Yelp organizes a collection of deals from the various local restaurants, shops and other destinations in a particular area and promotes those deals for customers to take advantage of. I found this to be a very interesting and beneficial aspect of Yelp’s platform. It makes sifting through the local businesses easier and is more enticing for customers to actually go visit a particular business.

In terms of my experience with Yelp, creating an account was very easy. I noticed that prior to creating an account, I was able to access and search a lot of the businesses in a particular area of interest that I searched. However, when I had my own account, I was then able to write reviews, message other people, and give various businesses a rating. Overall I was highly impressed with Yelp’s platform maneuverability. I found it very easy to get from one page to the next, and to find information and deals for local businesses.

After scrolling around on the social media site, I realized that it businesses could easily gain a bad reputation from receiving a negative review or a poor rating. However, I noticed that a lot of local businesses that did receive a negative comment usually commented back to the individual to try and mediate the situation. It is beneficial that businesses have the power to interact with their reviewers and have the opportunity to correct their situation, in a sense.

Another aspect relating to businesses on Yelp is that I didn’t notice much information on larger companies in the area, such as like a Walmart, or other large businesses. Yelp is truly available to help leverage small businesses and focused on getting customers to spend local. I find this to be Yelp’s best quality and purpose. Boosting the economy of the local area is very respectable from a social media site, and is why I will continue to use Yelp      
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