Yelp: Using social marketing to beat traditional review sites

On November 17, 2011, Eastern Time, Yelp submitted an IPO application to the SEC. This is currently the most popular consumer review website. It has become popular in the United States in recent years and has become the second Internet company name used as a greeting after Google - have you Yelped today? According to previous reports, Yelp's IPO valuation could reach up to $2 billion.

Let's take a quick look at Yelp's operating data (as of September 30, 2011):

More than 22 million user reviews have been accumulated, and 25,000 new reviews are generated every day;

With an average of 61 million unique visitors per month, the Yelp App is used on more than 5 million mobile devices;

There are approximately 529,000 registered business locations and 19,000 active local business accounts;

43 active local markets and another 22 local markets abroad.

The service scope of merchants participating in the review has expanded from catering to life services, including dentists, mechanics, plumbers, etc.

In terms of specific review shares, catering and shopping accounted for the largest proportion, accounting for 23% each, followed by family services, beauty and fitness, and art and entertainment, accounting for 10%, 9% and 8% respectively.

Currently, more than 70% of Yelp's revenue comes from local advertising, and the rest comes from brand advertising and other services from major national customers. When local businesses choose Yelp as a platform, they can create a homepage for free to improve store information and respond to reviews. When businesses place Yelp local ads, they can optimize search results, enrich pages and launch group buying services.

Currently, Yelp has successfully surpassed the two major review sites, CitySearch and Yahoo Local, and has jumped to the first place among review sites.

When analyzing Yelp's explosion and success, the most important point that cannot be ignored is the social operation method :

First, let’s look at how Yelp expands into a new market:

Before a new market is officially launched, Yelp first builds a personal homepage for local businesses based on third-party data, providing their location information, reviews, photos, history, etc. When it is officially launched, consumers can contribute their own reviews and add incomplete business information.

The next question is how to attract more consumers and local businesses. Yelp's strategy is to hire a community manager (of course, he must be a local) in each local market, who will be responsible for improving Yelp's brand awareness and cultivating a local review author community. The development of the community will drive the growth of reviews and continue to attract new users to contribute reviews.

The operation and cultivation of this local community also includes the style and writing of reviews. Yelp focuses on the length of key reviews and the description of details. Currently, the average length of all Yelp reviews is over 100 words. If you are an app user, you can sign in, upload photos, and post simple quick tips, but you are not allowed to post reviews because Yelp believes that mobile terminals are not suitable for writing complete and high-quality reviews.

In addition to online operations, the reviewer community also exists offline.

Just like Yelp's slogan, real people real review, Yelp encourages users to create their own social graph. Similar to general social networking sites, Yelp will recommend email contacts to new users and suggest inviting other friends to join Yelp.

This admiration for "real people" is also reflected in the user's search process. When you search for a service, your friends' previous reviews will be recommended to you.

The user's personal homepage records all the reviews they have written, Yelp friends, and the voting results (helpful/interesting/Cool) and praise tags (thanks/well written/unusual/marks, etc.) received by these reviews.

Through accumulated reviews, votes and praises, some of Yelp's review authors have become "elite users": they have more friends, votes and praises.

Under this "incentive", elite users contribute more to the website. According to a survey from Northeastern University, about 44% of Yelp's reviews currently come from these elite users. In order to maintain user interest and loyalty, community managers also organize regular offline activities.

Through close social relationships and community maintenance, Yelp's user loyalty far exceeds that of other review sites: according to the above research report, only 4.8% of citysearch users and 11.1% of yahoo local users have contributed more than 6 numbers, while Yelp's number reaches 65.8%.

It can be said that in terms of socialization, Yelp and CitySearch, these old review sites, are clearly differentiated: traditional review sites do not highlight the identity of the reviewer, while Yelp strives to make the reviewer the protagonist of the community, or even a celebrity.

Source: iUSStocks