Today, Facebook announced a series of visual changes and feature tweaks to the layout of business pages on the mobile version of its social network to make them easier to interact with. For instance, if you’re looking at the page of a restaurant or hair salon, you can now easily book a reservation or appointment through Facebook from the page. The redesign, which will be different for each category of page, is starting with pages for restaurants, local services, and TV shows. Facebook plans to roll out custom designs to other types of pages in the near future.
In addition to those changes, Facebook is making its recommendations feature more prominent by adding crowdsourced recommendations directly to pages as substitutes to traditional reviews. First launched in the fall of 2016, recommendations is a way to poll your friends for cool spots to see, eat, and visit in unfamiliar places, typically when you’re on vacation.
Facebook wants the feature to expand beyond vacation polls to include recommendations for local businesses, too. So now, when you recommend a restaurant or local business to a friend, Facebook will encourage you to write a more robust version of that recommendation by requiring a minimum character count and letting you add photos. That will then be added as a review to that establishment’s Facebook page.
The last set of changes the company is announcing today includes an expansion of its jobs platform and the addition of a new “Local” section with bookmarked places for you to check out in your area. The job application tool is now available worldwide. (It was previously restricted to certain markets.) The local bookmarks is a feature borrowed from Facebook’s companion Local app, and the company is giving it more prominence in the main Facebook app as a way to encourage people to explore events and businesses in their neighborhood.
