Technically, it’s not the iPhone itself that matters so much, it’s the iPhone’s new Operating System, iOS 6.
iOS 6 comes with a new mapping system. In the past, Apple partnered with Google for their mapping system, which is why I strongly recommended that churches register themselves in Google Places in the past. This is still extremely important for churches to do, but the iOS Mapping system no longer uses Google Places to find points of interest on an iPhone. So what does it use?
The new iOS mapping system uses Yelp (Yelp.com) to find it’s points of interests.
I’ve recommended Churches register themselves on Yelp in the past, because Yelp already has a popular smart phone app. Now it’s moved up in my rankings. Here are my new top 6 directory/location services a church needs to register with online.
- Google Places(http://www.google.com/places/)
- Yelp (Yelp.com)
- Bing Business Portal (http://www.bing.com/businessportal)
- Yahoo! Local (http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com)
- Foursquare (Foursquare.com)
- Yellow Pages (YP.com)
The iPhone still holds the lion’s share of the smart phone industry, so I wouldn’t take the importance of Yelp lightly. I should also remind users that just as many people use these location searches to find businesses as they do web searches because of the proliferation of smart phones.