  Social Networking accounts for a significant chunk of interest among various
online activities~\cite{smith2009social}. The proclivity of being social,
online, has been ingrained in us so much that we are actively producing content
for the rest of the world to see or take interest in our whereabouts, our
meals, our opinions, photographs etc. Yelp (https://www.yelp.com/), seamlessly,
integrates this very aspect of people in its portal. It engages people to write
reviews about the businesses they have availed the services of, rate them, add
photographs, tags, follow other people and their activities, etc. In this paper
we examine and present the co-relation between a user's rating and the
influence of the people, that the user follows, on the user for a particular
business. The group of people that the user follows is commonly referred as
friends of the user. We also analyze if a user can get influenced, if a
business has a certain number of reviews already present or if the reviews have
been written by elite reviewers (a reviewer who, according to Yelp, has
contributed exceptionally in engaging the community in the form of consistency
in writing reviews, as well as the quality of the reviews). Our analysis,
through correlation and regression techniques, is able to prove that the user's
rating remains unaffected by the number of people a user was friends with nor
does the existing number of reviews and presence of elite reviewers helps in
influencing a user. What shapes a user's rating is the overall experience, that
the user had at the restaurant.
