At last Yelp has rolled out a new feature, highly anticipated I might add, that lets business owners comment on their reviews publicly. This has been a long time coming, and I’m curious to see what it does to the dynamic of Yelp.com. It just rolled out last night.
The problem with not having such feature is that business owners would create fake Yelp accounts and review their own businesses to detract from what someone real said about them. The thing with that is that they almost always do such a sloppy job at it that you can tell the fakes from the real ones just by reading the reviews.
Now business owners have a serious and legitimate way to come back around. I feel that if a one star review were to be followed up with properly, there would be a good chance that the reviewer would update their review and maybe even increase their star rating.
It’s amazing how some business really do depend on having a good reputation on Yelp, so this is a great feature.
Many businesses have already started taking advantage of this. To get started, they just need to go to biz.yelp.com and claim their account page. Yelp has also put together a Business Owner’s Guide, a document worth skimming through if you’re in this boat.
