Food
Yelp, the company that connects consumers with local businesses, has launched Yelp Philippines.
From this week, people across the Philippines are able to read reviews about local businesses and create accounts on Yelp.com.ph to share their opinions. Yelp’s free iPhone and Android apps will be available as well as its free suite of business owner tools: Yelp for Business Owners.
The Philippines is Yelp’s 32nd international market and Tagalog, the local language marks the 18th language on the platform.
The nation is the fourth Asian market for Yelp following Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan, which itentered in March this year.
With a population of 100 million people, the Philippines is the sixth largest English-speaking nation in the world, with English widely spoken as a second language. It is also culturally diverse and internet savvy, with Filipinos sending more than 1 billion text messages per day.
Filipinos are also passionate about food a core category in the social media platform’s consumer recommendation system.
“Filipinos are so well-connected online and offline that we know they will love using Yelp to find and connect with great local businesses,” says Miriam Warren, Yelp VP of new markets.
“We will be working hard to make sure Yelp is the most useful and relevant local resource for every Pinoy.”
Yelp will kick off its community building efforts in Manila – one of the densest cities in the world – and soon bring together Yelpers online and offline to experience the best of Manila. Yelp will also be available across the entire country, so everyone, everywhere in the Philippines with access to the Internet on a desktop computer or a smartphone, now has the ability to share their opinions on what is great (and not-so great) about local businesses in the Philippines.
Yelp was founded in San Francisco in July 2004. Since then, Yelp communities have taken root in major metropolitan areas across 32 international markets. Yelp had a monthly average of approximately 142 million unique visitors in the first quarter of 2015. By the end of the same quarter, Yelpers had written approximately 77 million rich, local reviews, making Yelp the leading local guide for real word-of-mouth on everything from boutiques and mechanics to restaurants and dentists. Approximately 79 million unique visitors visited Yelp via their mobile device on a monthly average basis during the first quarter of 2015.
