• Your website is the hub of your online marketing wheel
• It is your permanent online brochure with basic information about your business
• It links to all your other online media and pulls in posts and reviews from social media

• Google introduced the Knowledge Graph in 2012 and is gradually rolling it out across its search properties. It is basically Google’s version of wikipedia and relies heavily on information posted on Google+ pages.

Nearly nine years after the founding of Facebook, the social media network has become galaxy all its own. It is both expanding and ever-present. At the very minimum, restaurants have some customers who are users, and they are spending a lot of time using it.

Like other social media, Facebook exists somewhat outside the reach of search engines and traditional webpages. This causes confusion for restaurant owners who think a website is enough. A good portion of online activities (and marketing opportunities) happens in Facebook and your website without a Facebook Page cannot give you access to people on Facebook.

Facebook is where a restaurant owner must start for social media marketing. Facebook’s preeminence is not being challenged at this point as all other social media combine doesn’t match the traffic and membership of Facebook. Even more importantly, Facebook eats up people’s time.

And much like the web proper, business is done in social media. No doubt, there are advertisements but even more importantly, there is marketing. Businesses carve out an identity and following of customers through Social Media. As mentioned before, none is more central as Facebook. And even though, unless you were under a rock for the last few years, you know some things about Facebook. Most though are at a loss in crafting Facebook to expand their business.

An extra half-star rating causes restaurants to sell out 19 percentage points more frequently (increase from 30% to 49% of the time), and up to 27 percentage points more frequently when alternate information is more scarce (e.g., Yelp is the only source of information about the business).

“Because Yelp collects and aggregates the experiences of a large number of patrons, Yelp provides a convenient forum to solve asymmetric information problems about the quality of unfamiliar restaurants.” In other words, Yelp is a great source of info when researching a business you’re unfamiliar with.

• Millions of people globally use Zomato every day to decide where to eat. While location and cost are factors a lot of folks consider, a restaurant’s rating also plays a role in one deciding whether or not to eat there. Given that it plays such a central role, we feel it’s important that a restaurant’s rating should be representative of the experiences people have had at that establishment.