New Yelp for Business Owners App Makes Customer Engagement & Reputation Management Easier

Yelp had an average of 135 million monthly unique visitors in the fourth quarter of 2014. Aside from the 71 million local reviews written by Yelpers, users can also search for events and interact with other Yelpers. Yelp’s success has prompted it to expand its services to help business owners manage their businesses more efficiently.

On December 15, 2014, Yelp rolled out a different version of its app called Yelp for Business Owners, and is designed “to make it easier for business owners to engage with their customers and manage their Yelp reputation on the go.”

According to Yelp, consumers have been sending an average of 55,000 messages to businesses via its free Message the Business tool since its debut in June 2014. In the third quarter of 2014, more than half (64%) of Yelp searches were done on mobile devices, and 73 million monthly unique visitors used Yelp on their mobile devices during the same quarter. Yelp’s new app is clearly a heaven-sent for business owners, as it will help them manage their Yelp presence on the go.

With this in mind, Andrew Martinez-Fonts, Product Manager at Yelp, stated that the new mobile app provides a “portable” way for business owners to more quickly and efficiently respond to reviews, customer inquiries, and messages. The app also comes with real-time mobile notifications, which notify users of new Yelp messages and reviews. Business owners can reply to reviews through a private message or public comment. [See Figure 1]

Figure 1 (Source: Yelp Official Blog)

Aside from real-time notifications, business owners are given ways to monitor their pages on Yelp. The Business Page activity, for instance, displays the number of views and leads generated over the past 30 days. For advertisers, reports on ad clicks from Yelp users are also provided.

The Yelp for Business Owners app was released on both iOS and Android on December 15, 2014. It was made available in 29 countries and 16 languages, with the company planning to add more features to the app soon.

For more information on the new app, here’s a video tutorial created by Yelp:

Video source: Yelp/YouTube

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