Twitter vs. Yelp for Small Business Owners
On May 19th 2009, I attended the workshop Online Marketing & Social Media for Small Businesses hosted during San Francisco Small Business Week. Twitter and Yelp were among the presenters to try to convince small business owners about the values of their services. Twitter didn't do it convincingly. On contrast, Yelp did a better job.
The room for the event was almost full of people. Most of them are small business owners that took valuable time off to learn about online and social media marketing. So instead of the typical Sillicon valley Meetup where majority of people are technology-centric or so-called xyz media experts, these are the non-typical-valley-users trying to use whatever tools to improve their bottom line.
Twitter presented first. The majority of the audience had no idea about Twitter and how it should be used. The presenter didn't seem to be well-prepared as he didn't showcase any specific successful story of small business owners using Twitter to promote their business. His example was to search for ice cream on Twitter, and showed how many tweets about people craving for ice cream and asking for recommendation. One people asked him to search for "San Francisco ice cream" and "SF ice cream" to narrow down the search. A couple of people in the audience asked how they can sort through sea of information and quickly get to the tweets that are relevant to the area their business serves. The Twitter guy admitted the inconvenient truth: Twitter isn't ready for local search. There's no easy way to search for tweets related to a city, a zipcode or an area. Twitter is great for converse. But small business needs to spend a lot of time to sort through to find their target audience/customers. With limited budget and time, if Twitter doesn't help with bottom line, most of small business owners are not going to have the time to try.
Twitter could have used Kogi BBQ as a success story. The story of Kogi using Twitter even got on LA Times. Kogi BBQ is very suitable to use Twitter to publish their latest location as their taco truck moves around. Their owners are also young and adapt in using the latest online marketing tools. One other successful story is Chicago Domino's. I feel restaurants/bars can really use Twitter to promote their daily specials, sell excess inventory(eg: 20% off between now and 3pm). That's the power of real-time communication where Twitter has the greatest strength.
The guy from Yelp did a much better job in presenting Yelp's value proposition. He showed a couple of videos of small business owners using Yelp to grow their business, to listen to customers and to resolve complaints. Yelp also let business owners claim their business pages so that they can update their business pages to reflect the latest offerings and interact with Yelp's reviewers and users(including responding to negative reviews). It seemed all people in the audience got the value proposition of Yelp.
I talked to a couple of small business owners afterward. The general consensus is that Twitter is not ready for them to jump in as they don't have the much time to just explore.
In summary, Twitter can become a big player in local search and local business lead generation if it can automatically filter/categorize tweets by locations. Until then, Yelp is a much better place for small business owners to spend their valuable time initially.
