Every Friday I share one of my favourite finds of the week — a website, tool or an app that has impressed me.
My Friday Favourite this week is Yelp – Discover Local Businesses.
What is it?
Yelp is an online directory for local businesses with crowd-sourced reviews.
How can it help me?
You can use Yelp to find good local businesses. Yelp is great for finding restaurants, cafes, pubs, hotels, shops and more.
As a Yelp user, you can “check-in” to the places you visit and leave reviews and tips about the place. This helps other Yelp users to find the best places – and avoid the worst!
I use Yelp a lot when travelling to a new City, to make sure that the places I’m visiting are worth spending my time and money on. Thanks to Yelp’s crowd-sourced reviews, I’ve found some real gems in terms of places to eat, and some fun, quirky shops to visit.
You can also use Yelp to bookmark places that have been recommended to you, that you would like to visit in the future. I often use this feature to do some research on a location before I travel to it so that when I arrive in that place, I’ve got a number of curated recommendations of places to visit ready to use.
I’ve been using Yelp for many years now. I use it every day to check-in to places and leave reviews that I hope will help others. I think this can help connect people with the best local businesses, and it also helps the best local businesses to stand out from the crowd.
Yelp recognised these contributions and made me part of their Elite Squad a few years ago. You can connect with me on Yelp to follow my recommendations.
As my friend Chris Marr talks about on using social media to win local business, if you own a business-to-consumer (B2C) business, then I’m not sure why you wouldn’t maintain a listing to be found by people on Yelp.
How much does it cost?
Yelp is free to use.
How can I get it?
Yelp is available to use as a website, and you can download apps for iOS and Android devices.
Visit Yelp.com for more details.
You can also follow @Yelp on Twitter, or visit the Yelp Facebook page.
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Richard Tubb is one of the best-known experts within the global IT Managed Service Provider (MSP) community. He launched and sold his own MSP business before creating a leading MSP media and consultancy practice. Richard helps IT business owner’s take back control by freeing up their time and building a business that can run without them. He’s the author of the book “The IT Business Owner’s Survival Guide” and writer of the award-winning blog www.tubblog.co.uk
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Comments
2 thoughts on Yelp – Discover Local Businesses
DAN BENTON
9TH AUGUST 2019 09:43:21
FYI, I would be VERY wary of this recommendation (no offence Richard) but I absolutely have friends that have been held to ransom by Yelp where Yelp would hide the positive reviews unless the company pays Yelp for a listing. There are numerous examples of this happening online ( https://www.reddit.com/r/smallbusiness/comments/ajkpik/yelp_is_attempting_to_extort_our_small_family/ ) and an entire Wikipedia section dedicated to it ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yelp#Controversy_and_litigation ) Sorry Richard but you couldn't pay me to go anywhere near Yelp.
RICHARD TUBB
15TH AUGUST 2019 06:58:52
Thanks for bringing this to my attention, Dan. I'm going to reach out to Yelp to see if they have any response to this.