Facebook App Integrates Food and Ticket Ordering Into Brand Pages

In the consistently updated Facebook app for iOS, the social media company is today introducing a slew of new features focused on event discovery and streamlined interaction with brands. Notably, now in the company's mobile app users will be able to purchase tickets to movies and concerts, buy food, or book an appointment without leaving Facebook.

For food and ticket orders, the feature is fueled by Facebook's partnership with services like Delivery.com, Slice, Ticketmaster, Fandango, and Eventbrite. Local businesses will need to be on board to support the appointment booking feature, but if they do users can simply request a specific time from the business' Facebook page after looking at their list of services. A response confirmation will be sent through Facebook Messenger when the appointment is decided upon.

To generate more personalized interactions, there's also a new Recommendations feature in the app that aims to make it easier to get advice from friends and family on places to see and things to do in a user's hometown, or while traveling in a new city. Recommendations are represented as a new status option, so users can post about wanting to check out new restaurants, for example, and their friends can comment back with suggestions to try in the area.

People come to Facebook every day to connect and share experiences with friends and family. We share the great places we go and we ask our friends for advice when we need help getting things done. Today we’re starting to introduce a variety of new features that help you use those connections to discover new things in the world around you, decide what to do or where to go, and connect with local businesses in easier and faster ways.

Facebook will accumulate all of these recommendations into one map, so it's easy to find the places that were mentioned in the comments of a post. To fuel personal discovery of events surrounding users, the company is also revamping the Events dashboard in the main Facebook app, with many of the same feature additions that it introduced in the standalone Events app, launched earlier in the month.

The company said that the update will be rolling out to users in the United States beginning today, and that "this is the first step" in its plan to make the app a one-stop shop for social planning. Facebook hopes that ultimately the app streamlines user and business interactions, and makes it easy for people "to get things done, make confident decisions and communicate directly with businesses on your time and terms."