Yelp: Social Media Phenomenon?

Yelp, the social media network for reviewing places and services in your local area, has turned into quite the juggernaut. With millions of reviews for everything from businesses to restaurants to doctors and jails, Yelp is quickly becoming the go-to place to find out about just about anything local.

But Yelp’s rise hasn’t been free of controversy. Businesses have been accused since the beginning of the site of writing their own positive reviews in order to push less than positive ones down on their page. Yelp also sets itself apart from other review services like Urbanspoon by offering paid listings. While most networks that are similar base their rankings and recommendations solely on user votes, Yelp allows companies to pay to get ahead. Some users don’t like this.

Lately, Yelp has also been under fire from small businesses. A small group of business owners is actually suing the service, accusing them of being liable for user reviews that have a bad impact on their businesses. Yelp won the initial suit, but the businesses are fighting back and trying to get the decision reversed. The lawsuit contains accusations by the businesses that Yelp offers to get rid of negative reviews and promote positive ones for a cost. Yelp denies those claims and says that if they are held responsible for user comments that the 1^st amendment of the users is being violated. The concern over this and similar issues have led to the development of many anti-Yelp websites.

However, Yelp and other similar sites can be very useful to consumers. Personally, I read review sites for just about everything. The vast quantity of votes and reviews about nearly everything often helps me to make a decision about where to eat or what to buy. On Urbanspoon, my favorite restaurant has nearly 2,000 votes and 151 diner reviews. That seems like a lot. Yelp has about 18 million monthly users – that’s a lot of reviews.

Mashable recently published an article about things that people would be surprised to learn about Yelp. Some of those include revenue of a business correlating to how many stars it has received on Yelp and that Yelp leans towards favoring independent businesses rather than chains. Business owners can also dispute Yelp reviews – though they could always address the negative review too. And surprisingly enough, restaurants are not the site’s biggest category – that honor goes to shopping. Yelp is also actually more frequently accessed from a computer rather than a mobile device.

Do you use Yelp? Let us know what you think of it!

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