Restaurant and business rating/locating service Yelp rolled out the ability for mobile users to “check in” to locations recently. Now there’s a good reason to actually do that: Yelp has added support for check-in offers. This lets businesses offer discounts, coupons, and other promotions to visitors who check in at their shops.

An updated version of the Yelp app for Android hit the Market yesterday bringing support for check-in offers. When you visit the Check-Ins tab of the app, you’ll now find a list of nearby locations that you can check into — as well as a bar at the bottom of the screen showing a promotion in your vicinity.

Update: Check-in offers are also now available on Yelp’s iOS app.

Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a good way to browse locations by promotion. So you’re stuck looking at that one promotional bar at the bottom of the screen. You can refresh the listing by exiting the Check-Ins section and coming back to see another promotion.

But if there are locations you regularly visit, you’ll be able to see any offers on their Yelp pages with the new Yelp app.

Yelp is hardly the first company to offer this features. Foursquare and Facebook already offer businesses the opportunity to provide offers to customers who check in using their mobile apps.

Brad Linder

Brad Linder is editor of Liliputing and Mobiputing. He's been tinkering with mobile tech for decades and writing about it since...