Two weeks ago Facebook released a new milestone in their path to world domination: Facebook Pages. Simple, yet cunning. Facebook now allows for organizations to create "pages" about their company, brand or product. Users of Facebook can then add these pages to their social network just like they add friends and acquaintances. You become a "fan" of the organization's page.
Interestingly enough, Facebook themselves actually use a restaurant as example of how these pages can be used to market a company or brand and build a "fan base" of people interested in what they do. Apparently there are quite a few people at Facebook HQ who like Indian food, since they chose a nearby place called Junnoon for their Facebook Pages sample setup.
I think restaurants are very well suited for this new feature. Everybody have an opinion on food and restaurants, we all want to show off where we like to dine, some people even define themselves partly through particular diets or food styles. So how can we at Livebookings use this to help our restaurants get more bookings?
Opentable has already shown the way. I must admit the guys at Opentable do a really good job of keeping on their toes and jump on new things.
Just like any user profile page, organizational pages can add applications created by Facebook or third party developers working with the Facebook F8 API. If a restaurant is an Opentable restaurant they can create a Facebook Page and add the Opentable Dining Reservations application to their profile, simply by entering their restaurant name and Opentable customer account number.
Hey, presto, a dead simple booking app shows up on the restaurant's page. Since a user who accesses the page is already signed in to Facebook, the booking process can be made extremely slick and quick. Nice.
We have been thinking for a while what we can do with the Facebook API, but being a white label company strictly working through partners to build a powerful and far reaching distribution network it is difficult to come up with an idea that won't cannibalize on our own business model. Also, as I have written about previously there are already a number of strong restaurant guide apps available in the Facebook suite of applications.
This gives us an opportunity to deliver essentially what we already do so successfully for our restaurants' own home pages, a straight forward booking interface putting real time reservations straight into their diaries.
