Yelp and Google Places - Use Social Directories to Boost Business

It's good to know great ideas just get better with time (like wine of course). I've been helping clients with their social marketing efforts for over 18 months now, a standard in my mind. It is still on the cutting edge for others – regardless of how easy it is.

A good post by Kevin Stirtz, HERE, touches a bit on why and how a company should focus on social marketing. What is key, especially for small and medium sized businesses, is that this should and can be done with a minimal amount of resources (money and your time) – even if folks in the business are not online personally and socially. I covered this back in February of last year in my blog post, Recognizing Customers as Best Social Marketing Resource.

My clients can integrate a level of social marketing into their month to month activities to really extend their footprint online, the one place a majority of their clients are researching purchase decisions. Social marketing is nothing more than identifying and managing a company's profiles across multiple social directory sites (e.g., Yelp, Google Local). I can give my clients relevant presence on as many as 10 relevant social directory sites.

Some things to consider when thinking through this:

• Start with a universal 'Profile' that one can use to populate and manage the multiple profiles online
• Look for online directory hubs like SUperMedia.com to cover multiple URLs at once
• Don't worry about some less then positive feedback over time - consider having 8 positive and 2 negative reviews versus 10 positive reviews. . . the former is sometimes more compelling

Where things can get really powerful is when my clients start directing happy customers to the sites they want to boost presence on based on traffic patterns - that's how I'm able to give my clients a real edge over the competition.

Have other's had success with this? Want to know more on who and how I've been able to help them?

Comments

[Bradford Dentist]

That’s some good advice. But it seems no matter how long I wait, I can’t seem to get my yelp.ca account connected to Google Places.
Does anyone know how often Google does a refresh of places to pull in related reviews?

[dental consulting]

I also advice medical professionals such as dentist, chiropractors and other practitioners to put their clinics in the map. Google places and Bing Finder gives us those opportunities.

[company profiles]

According to me most of the people are getting profits and customers by online marketing of their business. I also want to get my business profile on the front page of Google. Please tell me the procedure for this. Thank you.