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If you're planning a dinner and movie night, Facebook can help. The social network announced three updates coming to its mobile platform: a quick way to book restaurant reservations, the integration of television and movie listings on relevant Pages, and hashtag support.
Facebook partnered with popular real-time reservation service OpenTable, which supports reservations for 28,000 restaurants, according to its website. Traditionally, users visit OpenTable's website or mobile app to search for restaurants by location or name, then pick a date and time to secure a reservation. OpenTable also supports menus and customer reviews.
Facebook's integration with OpenTable puts a reservations option on participating restaurants' Facebook pages. Images from Facebook show this option below the restaurant's address and hours of operation and above customer reviews. Similar to OpenTable's website, users will be able to set a date, time and party size on the restaurant's Facebook page.
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"The update represents a new way of discovering and booking great dining experiences, all within the Facebook mobile app," Facebook's announcement said. This feature will be available on the Facebook mobile Pages for more than 20,000 restaurants. You do not need to be an OpenTable user to access the feature on Facebook.
Facebook also announced that U.S. primetime television and movie Facebook Pages will be updated with a new feature that displays listing information. Listings will be based on your current time zone and include the channel name, air time and a description of the show or movie playing, Facebook said. The information you see on Facebook is the same that cable guides, magazines and newspapers show. TV and movie details will be displayed in a section named "Upcoming Airing," a photo showed.
"Millions of people are visiting TV and movie Pages on Facebook every day, especially on mobile," Facebook said. "Providing listings information on Facebook offers timely and relevant information about the media content people care about most."
Lastly, hashtag support will be included in Facebook's latest mobile update. The social network first launched this feature, which makes words and phrases clickable and searchable, for desktop versions in June. You'll be able to search for hashtags and tap them directly when you see them in posts on your mobile device.
The new listings feature and hashtag support will be available to iOS users right now, Facebook said. OpenTable integration will launch to both iOS and Android users. These features will roll out automatically starting this week.
Facebook's latest mobile updates follow a handful of other changes Facebook has made recently. Last week, the social network announced changes to its News Feed that tweak which posts you see and when you see them. It also enabled secure browsing for all users and will reportedly launch video ads in news feeds starting this fall.
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