Who really uses Yelp and who the heck cares?

So I'm located in Green Bay Wisconsin. Admittedly not the center of the technological Universe however, when I am speaking to business owners I often filled questions regarding Yelp such as:

Why should I care?

Nobody uses it anyway.

I'm not really certain of the statistics of  Yelp users in my area but, one thing I am very certain of is that it is extremely important for businesses to take it seriously. That's because Yelp is a foundational database background for business listings in Apple products, Bing, Yahoo and others.  Perhaps you even recall when Google showed it Yelp reviews on their business listings. They may not do that anymore but I guarantee that it is part of their algorithm when ranking businesses and websites.

Don't believe me? Whip out your iPhone, say “Hey Siri - find me a good plumber”  and see what comes up.

Do the same on Bing (23% market share) and Yahoo (12% market share)...

I often find myself saying sometimes you advertise to the customers and sometimes you ever ties to the search engines. Make sure you do a good job for both.

Why you shouldn't boost your Facebook posts

One of the easiest ways that people find to get traffic is by boosting their Facebook posts. I agree that it is fun ( for lack of a better word) to watch all of the likes, views and maybe even follows. It's validating in many respects. For those of us that have pages  instead of just personal accounts, we can actually see how many views it is had rather than just the reactions.

From a business standpoint, for most people, it's a horrible idea to do this.

Why you might ask? The answer is because most people are not good copywriters and  there is no outcome defined for the paid for advertising. What does that mean? That means when someone clicks on your link that you are paying for it should take them to a website where you can hopefully grab lead information from them. I run across so many businesses that don't do this well. For me, I don't care how many views there were. I don't care how many likes there were. I don't care much anymore about how many people follow my page. Facebook has changed over the last couple of years. For businesses, it's a paid platform only. In many estimations you only get about 15% of your followers to see your posts. Unless you have a rabid fan base that isn't much. Unless you have hundreds of thousands of followers that isn't much.

So what should you do? Learn how to do it right. Facebook is a behemoth. It can send you lots of traffic. The traffic only exists to provide leads or sales. Stop thinking of it as anything but that. One of the things I love to say to clients is to stop building your farm on someone else's land. Facebook is Mark Zuckerberg land and you need to pay him. So if you're going to pay him make sure that you're getting the most out of it.

Create lead pages that work. Forms. Compelling reasons to get someone to call you, give you their email address or sign up.

Then your ready to boost and make it worth your while.