Facebook Adding Professional Restaurant Reviews
What’s Up: The social networking giant is partnering with respected food sites Grub Street, Bon Appetite, San Francisco Chronicle, Conde Nast Traveler, and Eater.com to include professional reviews in searches for restaurant pages. The new feature, tentatively called enhanced reviews, is still in the pilot stage. It displays professional reviews, aggregated opinions from Facebook users, and testimonials from a user’s contacts in restaurant searches. Grub Street announced the partnership by asking if readers were “tired of crowdsourcing opinions from Yelp”. Facebook was more diplomatic in their statement. In a conversation with The Verge, a spokesperson framed the new feature as an extension of their longstanding practice of hosting business pages and a move towards a more local focus with the hope of improving user experience, “Since reviews are such an important part of helping people make informed decisions about what to do locally, we’re excited to be incorporating a new way for people to use Facebook to find the best real-world experiences”. The program officially launched earlier this week with “thousands” of participating restaurants across the US and the 5 foodie publications. Though most reviews have been positive so far, a Facebook representative did say the site will feature negative reviews when applicable.
What Does It Mean: Facebook is making a move towards local search. Many see this move in continuity with other new Facebook features like Instant Articles, which partners with news publications to feature articles in people’s feeds and Place Tips, which gives Facebook users local business recommendations based on their likes and location settings. Facebook also added a mobile payments feature to its app. These new features will not affect what goes into a well constructed online presence but they will force business to focus more attention on Facebook. Appster Co-Founder Josiah Humphrey explains, “smart restaurants that are well versed in social media will start putting resources towards Facebook. You have to be proactive about it, and that’s the responsibility of the company. It’s just how we should be doing business in the 21st century. [Facebook reviews] are just more work at this point”. Right now its restaurants but other business should take notice by examining their social media and local SEO strategies. Facebook clearly has ambitions of being more than a social network. Given their reach and authority, optimizing for local results within their platform will become more important.
