Can You Hear the Yelping Yet?
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If you own a small business and haven’t heard about Yelp yet, you will – and you should probably start looking into the site now. This three-year-old social network seems to be the hottest thing in online reviews lately. In this article I’ll explain what it is and how it can help you.
Yelp was founded back in 2004 by twenty-something PayPal alumni Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons. While the two founders have earned a reputation as party boys, it was Stoppelman’s search for a doctor that gave Yelp its initial push. The somewhat convoluted original system was set up so that users asked for recommendations, and answers were posted to a central site. When the founders realized that many users were posting unsolicited reviews, they knew they needed to change course.
The current site has been described as reviewing everything from dive bars to funeral parlors – anything with a postal address. (Just for the record, we’re not in their system yet). Though Yelp’s roots are in San Francisco, the site lists dozens of cities with “Yelpers” and many reviewers are happily writing about places in towns and areas that the company isn’t officially covering yet.
Yelp’s growth in the last year has been pretty amazing. This June, more than 1.4 million people visited its site, an increase of 124 percent over June of last year, according to comScore. The site boasts more than million reviews. Granted, that’s a drop in the bucket when compared to CitySearch’s 15.7 million visitors this June, but that reflected an increase of only 15 percent over the previous year for the veteran review site. And Yahoo’s Local Guide may look unassailable with 29.5 million unique monthly visitors, but it was actually down 12 percent from the previous year.
There is no question that some small businesses have been seeing the effects of Yelp reviews. Cory Treffiletti, writing for Media Post Publications, mentioned that his allergist had recently signed up with Yelp and, as a result, saw 100 customer inquiries in just five days – nine times better than any previous advertising effort run by the office. Christopher Hall, owner of the Splitends hair salon, told Fortune that he was seeing a ton of business as a result of Yelp reviews. “Saturday I came in at 6:30 A.M., left at 8 P.M., and did 22 people. I woke up Sunday and my hands were all swollen,” he said in his interview with the publication.
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