Already live in the U.S. on iOS and Android, Facebook Local will help users discover bars, restaurants, and nearby attractions, making it easier to do looks ups that are very common when planing an outing with friends.
While Facebook Local’s main page shows shortcuts to several nearby restaurants, cafes, drinks, attractions, and more, as well as where friends and people, allowing you to pick between great bars at a block, or find out if one has a live band playing.
It includes a calendar of your day’s Events, a "Trending Events" feed, guides to music, nightlife, art, and other happenings, and options to see everything happening on certain days.
Facebook Local, as alternative to Yelp or Foursquare, offers a wide range of local business data with your social graph and user generated content like photos and reviews, which in turn enable businesses to get more ROI in their Facebook Pages, as it turn all their offline activities into Facebook Events, and seek more social interaction from their customers.
For now, however you can’t order directly from Local like with the Facebook app’s feature, but restaurant Pages do include a link to a deliverer.
Albeit, it improves something like the ability to search for ‘cappuccino’ not just ‘cafes’, those “enhancements reflect back immediately” and actually promotes the given local business.
Facebook could have finally given Events the spotlight they deserve within the local business listings, as it's “Bringing the world closer together” few things do that as vividly as a mobile app.
