Now when people visit a restaurant’s Facebook page, they can book
directly from the page without leaving to go to another app. It will be
available for all 20,000 restaurants on OpenTable in North America.The move places Facebook more in competition with Yelp, which also has an integration with OpenTable for reservations. If Facebook could build out more reviews or signals to indicate which of your friends “Liked” a particular restaurant, that could be a real competitor to Yelp.
In another change today, Facebook is adding television listings on its mobile app. For TV shows and movies that have a Facebook page, those pages will now display the next local time and TV channel it is playing. The listings are based on current time zones. In other words, this is like TV Guide listings on Facebook.
Both of these moves give users more reason to use Facebook and Facebook pages in particular. In the past these pages have been used for posting status updates or promotions. Or they would have basic static information about a business. With these updates Facebook is making them more productive and useful.
On the restaurant side, this could be just a first step into bookings and local commerce for the company.
Facebook has tried more than once on “offers” or deals products for local businesses. While that hasn’t
been a major hit as daily deals have faltered overall, Facebook could instead get into any kind of local bookings or reservations. On the media side, TV listings could be the first of other listings in, say movies or other live concerts or shows.
Importantly, further moves into bookings would connect Facebook with small businesses, many of which already have Facebook pages but don’t pay Facebook to use them. That could be a big revenue opportunity if Facebook could drive more customers to them. It also provides a revenue opportunity outside of advertising.
Article courtesy of Forbes
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