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| Facebook Food Ordering And Ticketing Utility |
Facebook wants you to participate in your community, not just talk
about it, with a slew of new features launching today. From Facebook
Pages, you’ll now be able to order food through Delivery.com and Slice,
request an appointment through MyTime,
get a professional services quote, or buy movie and event tickets
through Ticketmaster and EventBrite without leaving Facebook.
This is the latest evolution of Facebook’s quest to make the Yellow Pages come alive. Native
ticket buying could be especially powerful since 650 million people use
Facebook’s Events feature each month but always have to go log in
somewhere else to actually purchase their admission. Reducing this
friction could make Facebook more popular with Event promoters looking
for a high-conversion destination to their ads.
If you want your friends’ suggestions about what to do either in your
city or while traveling, you can use the new Recommendations feature. It
automatically appears when Facebook’s artificial intelligence detects
that you’re writing a status update requesting advice from friends. If
you turn on Recommendations, a big request for suggestions will appear
in the News Feed, and comments from friends will be added to a map and
Recommendations bookmark for easy browsing. Now it will be a lot easier
to solicit and manage answers to “Where should I go in Tokyo?” or
“What’s the best burrito in San Francisco?”
Lastly, Facebook is bringing the best of its new standalone Events app
back to the Events tab in its main app. You’ll now by default see a
feed of Event discovery content including RSVPs from friends, and ways
to browse what’s up today, tomorrow, or this weekend. You can switch to a
more traditional full calendar of what’s coming up for you. The idea is
to reveal what parties, concerts, art exhibitions, meetups, and more
could be happening right around you.
All these experiences will start rolling out today in the US. If they
perform well, Facebook may extend them to other geographies.
This is about stealing a little bit of the traffic currently flowing
to Google, Yelp, Fandango, local news, and mobile food ordering apps.
Facebook thinks a convenient browsing experience powered by friends’
suggestions can beat a mobile search experience that requires a bunch of
typing and doesn’t understand who you are.
Of course, that will require a shift in behavior users may be
stubborn to make. But it would provide Facebook with lucrative data on
what you buy from where. If Facebook knows you frequently buy concert
tickets for a certain venue or order a specific type of food, it can
better target its ads towards you.
The more Facebook can become a place where you learn about and
interact with businesses, the more it can accomplish its goal of
connecting you with more than just people, and the more likely that
businesses will pay to grow their visibility on the social network.
Source: Josh Constine (@joshconstine)
