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.
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All these experiences will start rolling out today in the US. If they perform well, Facebook may extend them to other geographies. Developers can apply for access to this Facebook Pages utility platform.
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.
Josh Constine is a Venture Partner at ~$3 billion AUM early-stage VC fund SignalFire where he invests in pre-seed startups with a focus on consumer. He teaches startup pitch writing and fundraising strategy as a recurring lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School Of Business, and with accelerators like Z Fellows, Inception Studios, and Stanford ASES. Previously, Constine was Editor-At-Large for TechCrunch where he wrote 4000 articles and was ranked the #1 most cited tech journalist in the world from 2016-2020 by Techmeme. Constine has led 300+ on-stage interviews and keynotes in 18 countries with luminaries including Mark Zuckerberg and the CEOs of Shopify, DoorDash, Snapchat, Instagram, and more. Constine graduated from Stanford University with a Master’s degree he designed in Cybersociology, and wrote his thesis in 2008 on why remixable memes would be the future of marketing. He has been quoted in the NYT and WSJ, is regularly featured on CNN for his thoughts on AI and Silicon Valley, and advises startups on PR, fundraising, and organic growth.