My previous post mentioned that utilizing Yelp would be very beneficial to Central Brew. By doing a quick search in Yelp of "coffee" within the San Marcos area, I can directly see my competition in the area. In the same general area, I can easily see three other coffee shops. The first one I see is Starbucks which is flagged as an ad in addition to the normal pin point. From that, I can see the benefits of using money to have my location stick out from the rest of the points if people do Yelp searches. Just glancing over, I can also see that they're ratings are low with only 72 reviews for 3.5/5 stars. Another competitor in the area is Perks Coffee House which has 4 stars for 373 reviews. Unfortunately, Yelp shows one blurb of a comment on the search page and this happens to talk about flies throughout the entire store. Had this review been for my business, I would have attempted to make a resolution immediately. Now anyone looking for a coffee shop in the area will be turned away if they do not look further into the page. The last coffee shop in the area is Duke's Hawaiian Coffee which only has 1 review and is 2/5 stars. Clearly, they have not made an attempt to utilize yelp to it's full potential and I would deem them as not a threat.
Similar to Yelp, if you go to Google and search for a business in an area, business blurbs and ratings also pop up. In t his case, I searched "coffee shops San Marcos" and really only one of the coffee shops mentioned above show up. Perks Coffee House has 4.5/5 stars on Google for 228 reviews. I personally use Yelp way more than the Google functions but for my business, it would be another way to get more details and customer feed back to allow me to adjust any issues I find.
LinkedIn to me as always been a networking type social media and as an avid user, I don't see a draw for businesses to utilize aside from recruiting and getting their name out there. For my business, I would not use LinkedIn as I feel it would be a waste of resources that I could be using to improve my customer interaction social media applications such as Facebook/Twitter.
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