There is a simple and realistic way to encourage Yelp reviews of your business, one that will take you only 1 minute a day (on average). Just do a “Find Friends” search on Yelp on every person you’re about to ask for a review on any site (e.g. Google Maps), and adjust your request accordingly. Even one “Find Friends” lookup a day is enough to keep the review doctor away.
Go to “Find Friends” and enter your customer’s email address(es).
If that customer doesn’t have a Yelp account, your search will yield nothing. But if your customer does have a Yelp account, you’ll see his or her name, along with the number of reviews written, photos taken, and “friends.”. If your customer has written at least 5 reviews, you’ve hit paydirt. (More on that in a minute.)
There’s nothing else to it, other than to ask your customer for a review – on Yelp, somewhere else, or anywhere. (More on that in a minute.)
A quick “Find Friends” check may seem too simple, but that’s why it can work well. It’s just a way to gather facts before you ask for a review, rather than during a reputational autopsy later. By taking this approach, you will avoid the big mistakes:
- Ignoring Yelp and playing hope chess until the Customer from Hell gives you your first 1-star review.
- Not doing anything to encourage reviews on Yelp, perhaps because you assume nobody’s paying attention.
- Asking everyone to review you on Yelp, only to have their reviews get filtered.
- Doing shady stuff to get Yelp reviews before getting tarred and feathered.
- Obsessing over Yelp reviews at the expense of your reviews everywhere else.
- Giving customers too many choices as to where to review you, which makes it much harder to provide clear and undaunting instructions. (Better to focus on just one site, whenever possible.)
Mike Blumenthal laid out this strategy clearly and excellently in his 2015 post, which I suggest you read and apply. I recommend a few tweaks to your SOP:
- Make a “Find Friends” lookup part of your everyday strategy, regardless of whether you’re dying for good Yelp reviews or are in good shape. It should not be a Hail Mary pass. Look up each customer before you ask for a review, even if you planned to ask that person to review you elsewhere.
- Skip the bulk-check process, which I described in my 2016 post., at least for now. You’re trying to form daily habits that are so quick and easy that you have no excuse not to do them.
- If a reviewer has written more than 5 reviews, include in your request (probably an email) a link to your Yelp page.
- Also do a “Find Friends” lookup on customers who reviewed you without your needing to ask. If your Yelp-reviewing customer has reviewed you somewhere else – like Google Maps – consider asking him or her to copy and paste that review into Yelp. Why re-write a perfectly good review? Cross-posting is fine, in that I’ve never seen it cause a review to get filtered, and in that the practice is standard enough that it doesn’t look odd to most would-be customers.
Some notes and suggestions:
a. You don’t need to ask specifically for a Yelp review. You can just ask for a review on any old site, with the knowledge that the customer seems to like Yelp and is likely to post there by default.
b. You don’t need to use your Yelp business account.
c. You can always do the bulk lookup if you have a list of hundreds or thousands of customers and want to zero in on who’s active. Expect maybe 1-2% of your customers to have written more than a couple of Yelp reviews.
d. If a customer has multiple email addresses that you know of, enter each email address into “Find Friends.” If, for instance, a customer’s personal email isn’t associated with a Yelp account, his or her business email might be.
e. Yelp will also show you how many photos your customer has uploaded. That will tell you, for one thing, the likelihood that your customer will post photos with his or her review – whether it’s on Yelp, Google Maps, or any other review site. Encourage photos whenever you can.
f. Yelp reviews have become even more prominent in the AI era, with Yelp reviews often cited in chatbots’ results.
Now, for the elephant in the room: should you ask customers specifically for a review on Yelp? I think you should. Don’t buy reviews, ask your Uncle Bob to review you, or play with similar finger traps. But also don’t overestimate Yelp and assume it sees or cares about everything, because it does not. Is requesting a Yelp review against Yelp’s guidelines? Yes. Will Yelp have any way to know you asked for a review? No. In any event, it’s your risk to take or not to take. Personally, I suggest you get scrappy. What would Little Joe do?
What’s worked for your business, or hasn’t, on Yelp? Any upsides or downsides of this approach I didn’t mention? Leave a comment!
