If you choose to negatively yelp a small business without giving a fair chance to remedy, you are choosing to:
- Bully
- Threaten someone’s job or even business
- Negatively affect someone’s mental health
Businesses who don’t have 4 stars or above, are losing money. Period, stop. I get Yelp for certain industries, but more often than not Yelp is hurting businesses.
Small Businesses
Small businesses on yelp get crushed simply by the numbers. Most small business average less than 3 reviews a year. It’s nearly impossible to make up any ground after one negative review. You finally get a good review, and it gets filtered. Reviews are filtered with little to no transparency.
Also as a small business you can’t opt out of yelp. It feels mafia like. You gotta pay to play or get taken out.
Let me ask you this:
How often have you thought about yelping a company? Was it during a positive or negative experience? Almost always it is negative.
We’re mad.
It didn’t go our way.
Someone was rude.
Our clients are independent homeowners, and our customers are their tenants. Homeowners and residents rarely agree on much due to completely different points of view. There are a myriad of consumer laws and regulations that emphasize their differences.
So how does a property manager get a positive review?
Sure, we could pay for positive reviews. We could incentivize our team to collect fake ones. There is even a documentary about Yelp’s advertising services. Whose got time or money for that? I am trying to run a business over here. Only to get knocked down by some 20 something year old who is pissed off about today’s inconvenience. Wait till you have to apply for a mortgage or do something else adulting.
As a small business owner, we want the feedback. We want to do better. Give a small business the chance to fix the issue before publicly shaming. When you choose to do that, you are choosing to maybe cost someone their job or worse, the business entirely. Small businesses are crucial to the economy and our communities. Not every interaction with a business is going to be a perfect. Posting a negative review on Yelp should be a last resort after you have at least attempted to allow the business an opportunity to fix it.
