How to Use Yelp’s “Check-In Offers” to Boost Your Business

Geosocial commerce is all the rage these days and an increasing number of businesses are joining the location-based social networking bandwagon. The concept is simple – be aware of a user’s location, provide a medium to propagate this location information to social networks and monetize the process for businesses by offering check-in discounts and special offers.

Though the battle for being the supreme business-friendly location-based social network has been a two-horse race (Foursquare and Gowalla) till now, it’s refreshing to see Yelp step in with an offering of it’s own, right before the holiday season.

Yelp Check-In Offers

The newly-launched “Check-In Offers” feature on Yelp empowers businesses to offer discounts to store visitors. It is a great opportunity for businesses to promote repeat check-ins and bring brand loyalty. Yelp lets businesses create three kinds of promotional offers – percent off, free or fixed price offers.

Yelp provides one-click access to “Check-In Offers” through its business dashboard, which lets business owners activate the rewards feature by creating a special coupon that will entitle returning customers to a percent discount, a fixed price discount, or a free item. When Yelp users visits your store, they can avail the offer at “check-in” time using their iPhone or Android phone.

Business Friendliness

It’s fair to say that the new Yelp feature is all about being more business-friendly. Pitching discounts, freebies and promotions to customers is now easier than ever. Along with the “Check-In Offers”, Yelp has simplified the user interface and introduced a new navigation scheme which makes it easy to manage multiple business listings and view detailed statistical and analytical reports on various offers.

How does your business benefit from “Check-In Offers?”

If you are in the retail business, you better not miss a golden opportunity like this. There are plenty of ways in which your business can leverage the Yelp “Check-In Offers” feature. Some examples would be a restaurant offering a free starter dish to users after three check-ins. Similarly, businesses can offer cash cards and/or Happy Hours discounts in order to lure more customers to visit their stores.

Yelp vs. Foursquare vs. Gowalla vs. Facebook

Though Foursquare and Gowalla offer similar location-based services, Yelp is the big daddy in the business world as it’s heavily used by users for “recommendations”. I have no doubt that Yelp Check-In Offers will give Foursquare and Gowalla a run for their money in the business world.

Yelp’s Check-in Offers has a striking resemblance to the recently-launched Facebook Deals feature. Interestingly, Facebook Deals uses the same concept to let businesses promote their offerings through rewards and discounts to users who check-in using Facebook Places.

Amongst all these location-based services, I believe Yelp has an upper hand as it has a strong user community and is already accepted by businesses as well as customers as a reliable recommendation service/ customer service avenue.

Do you plan to use Yelp “Check-In Offers” to promote your business? Are you already using any other location-based services to boost your business? Please share your social media experience by leaving a comment below this post.

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