Consumers and businesses alike are turning to online reviews of businesses to decide who they would like to buy from. The Internet offers easy access to sites like Yelp.com to help with these decisions. User-contributed business reviews are an important part of social media today. Your business is likely to be reviewed by someone who has bought from you or used your services.

As a business owner or manager you can take a proactive role and use sites like yelp.com as a marketing tool. Actively asking every customer you do business with to rate your company on Yelp will accomplish 3 things.

1. It will show your customers that you care about your service and quality.
2. Members of your business know they have to take care of the customer or potentially suffer a poor review.
3. Your business enjoys increased visibility in your community and market place.

For consumers it is easy to register and find or add a business that you have purchased from and to share your experience (good or bad).

For businesses, once you have been reviewed, you can edit your profile, post your hours of operation, post photos and even write a message to your customers that will appear in your profile.

Yelp.com has over 3 million unique visitors each month and is the number one review site in use today. Using business review sites like yelp.com is a great way to engage with the community as both a business and an individual.