How Yelp’s Incentivized Check-Ins Will Help Local Businesses

You probably already have a Facebook profile for your business, your company is listed on LinkedIn, perhaps you’re tweeting in the Twitterverse and showcasing photos on Instagram, but there’s a relatively new game in town over on Yelp’s popular review platform.

Launched back in 2010, along with Yelp’s iPhone application, version 4, they hyped a laundry list of new features, including the ability to “check-in” to a business using their smartphone. They gave a short description of some of their new features, a profile option, friend finder, sharing on Facebook and connecting on Twitter, but they were really selling their check-in function, and for good reason as some are calling it the ability to “evangelize” your business.

The Details at Check-In

Yelpers can check-in to businesses and that gives the user the ability to broadcast their whereabouts and send “Quick Tips” to others on Yelp, post to Facebook and fly over to Twitter. If others opt-in to these updates, they will see the broadcaster’s location both through push notifications, alerts, and as located on a map.

Users of this feature may receive regular statuses of highly-frequented businesses making them a part of an active group of people who patronize that particular business. A symbol will appear next to reviews and tips on business pages within the app, and on the actual listing at Yelp.com.

Values For Local Business with a How-To-Guide

It’s ironic that Yelp released the app describing it to their users blogging in January of 2010, and then later in November, they posted directly to businesses promoting check-in offers for companies and small businesses, but it’s still an exciting opportunity. Yelp touted statistics about their platform back in 2010 and gave step-by-step instructions for creating a check-in offer. Those statistics boasted that:

• In a month, more than 38 million responded to Yelp to make a purchasing decision and that figure has continued to rise.

• Apple named and inducted Yelp’s smartphone app into their Hall of Fame over 300,000 other choices.

• Mobile calls to a Yelp business happens every five seconds from their app.

• While there were 14 million reviews on Yelp at the time, 5 million of them were written in 2010 alone.

More About This Growing Trend

When businesses take advantage of these Yelp offers, after they unlock their account and offer special discounts, Yelpers are promoting their company on other social platforms through this check-in procedure. Some are calling check-in offers the “new coupon,” and smartphone users are redeeming them in rapidly growing numbers with no end in sight.

For example, according to some statistics, not only is more than half of the time spent connected to the internet coming from mobile devices, the use of these omnipresent handheld tools are expected to rise at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 45% over the next five years, or over ten times the current rate by 2019. When it comes to coupons, one in four mobile users is redeeming them and that was a 66% increase from 2012. This number will continue to rise exponentially especially in light of these accompanying statistics.

There’s more to social media networking than promoting your business on Facebook, “check-out” more opportunities available on other platforms like Yelp. With the continued popularity of mobile, your business numbers will also continue rise.

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