Finding the perfect place to eat or drink, or finding a recommendation for a local business or service these days takes us to Facebook to ask our friends and family. Now Facebook is making its recommendations feature more prominent by adding crowdsourced recommendations directly to pages as additions to the traditional reviews.
Have you noticed the changes on your Facebook page yet? Take a quick look.
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. It is also used to source local businesses like plumbers, carpenters or marketing agencies ;)
Facebook wants the feature to expand beyond vacation polls to include recommendations for more local businesses. 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.
Do you encourage clients or customers to review your Facebook page or any other review channel? Do you look at reviews on facebook and make a decision on a purchase based on that?
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.