Facebook will soon be displaying restaurant reviews when visitors search for or visit pages of restaurants. These reviews are pulled from reputable publications such as New York Magazine, Bon Appetit, the San Francisco Chronicle, Conde Nast Traveler and Eater.
This is an effort to keep Facebook users on the Facebook site, instead of losing the visitor traffic to offsite review websites. Their Instant Articles feature did much the same - kept original content on Facebook. Facebook has said that this kind of integration provides a better experience for customers, particularly on smartphones.
As part of the feature's test rollout, Facebook will host short summaries of each publications' reviews, which will appear when people search for restaurant and also on the business pages of some restaurants. People can then click on links and be taken to the full reviews on the publishers' sites.
In order to give you access to even more helpful information about local places, we're testing a new unit that will display critic reviews for certain restaurants in the US. Starting today, you'll now see critic reviews in addition to reviews from friends and other people who have been there.
— Facebook spokesperson
Recently, Facebook has been pushing hard to attract small businesses to its platform. With over 30 million business pages, Facebook is trying to find ways to make it easier for those companies to advertise to their highly targeted audiences.