California Miramar University

Hey everyone,

Here is another video from the lecture I gave back on October 26 on social media marketing. The first video I posted was all about Google Love, and this one provides insights on how to optimize Yelp for your business.

Not only is Yelp a great place to find reviews about companies (and competitors) – it’s also a great way to market your business and build your brand with search engines. Google, Yahoo and Bing all hold Yelp in high regard and so it’s very important to encourage your customers to post positive review sites.

One tip for doing this: make it as easy for them to do as possible. Give them links via e-mails/pamphlets/whatever and tell them exactly how to do it. The easier it is for them to review you, the more likely they will (and the more likely you’ll get MORE reviews).

I hope you enjoy this video. Let me know what you think and if you have any questions in the Comments section below.

Best,

Ilana Herring

Transcript of the Lesson

Okay, strategy number seven, optimizing for Yelp. I’m not going to tell my anecdote to explain how you learn from this cool Yelp news, but I’ll just say that when I put up the press release about this event, people, someone from Yelp saw it and called. And Yelp is really interesting, like I shared about with your question, you know the reviews. You want people to write your reviews who are already active.

Now what you should think about is you might have customers who are active who you don’t ask to write a review. You should go to Yelp, if you’ve never done this, and see what’s already there. Okay. Then you should claim your business if you haven’t already done this. Go to Yelp for Business Owners; that’s going to get me there.

Okay. This is a screenshot of actually my dentist, of his Yelp page. Now he hates Yelp, he ignores it. He happens to be an amazing dentist, so I will show you on the next page all his reviews are stellar. His photos were put up by patients. Okay, most of us do not have the luxury of this. If you do, you should really be proud of yourself. I think that we should all think of our social media as both coming and going. We participate, we claim our business, we put up material and we hope our customers reply and our future prospects engage with us.

Okay, there’s other review sites as well that might be relevant. If you’re in the travel industry, TripAdvisor.com; definitely check out MerchantCircle.com, I recommend that as well. And when you claim your business you’re basically just going to be putting this information in, putting in some photos, and putting in your marker if you’re not on a map. So check it out, it’s a Google map. If you did your Google Places it’s probably already there, and it’s probably already right.

Okay. secrets for optimizing Yelp. Claim your page. So again, if you didn’t do that already, this is where you claim your business. So go to Yelp.com and look at the upper right hand corner for ‘Business Owners’.

Add in information about your business, your hours of operation, photos, et cetera. If you are a home based business and don’t have a street address that you want to advertise, you can just use your city and zip code. That’s really nice,that’s 2:09 for Yelp. I don’t think that applies for all social media, so embrace Yelp if you’re a home based business.

Understand the Yelp review filter. We already spoke about that. If you want to understand it more,Google, I hate the Yelp review filter – just Google “Yelp review filter” and you’ll find a video on it.

Okay this is cool. So back here where there’s photos; you can put up a photo about anything that is relevant to your business. One secret strategy you can use is you can make a coupon – 25% off, 10% off, whatever your coupon is – save it as a photo, as a .jpeg, and upload it as a photo. So now you’ve used that photo place to make a coupon.

Video Transcription by GMR Transcription