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On December 17th, 2015, Facebook announced that they’re aiming to make their “Facebook Events” app a little more useful. iOS users in 10 major U.S. cities have access to look through Facebook Events in their local area. With the new update, we have the discovery feature when you’re in your main events dashboard that you can browse through fpr categorized events such as sports, fitness, music, food and drink, etc.. You can also switch location settings to view what events are in other areas as well.
Facebook Events has been somewhat of a sleeping giant for the company. Back in July, they announced that the service is being utilized by 450 million individuals on a monthly basis. With that being said the high ranking staff have determined that it still needs quite a bit of work. Some of the efforts have started rolling out with more features such as including more events that will show up in users news feeds, more intelligent notifications and showing of related events. With so much information being gathered on what people like and do, structuring a more solid Events app is just a natural step.
“We have a good sense of how people look for things to do.” Facebook product manager Aditya Koolwal told Wired back in November 2015. “The social signals we have, the friends who are interested in going, the friends you can potentially go with; that’s our bread and butter, so we’re going to try and take advantage of that as much as we possibly can as we roll out more discovery features.”
The only “catch” I guess you could say is that this feature can only be viewed by iPhone users in major U.S. cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, Dallas, Seattle, Miami, Houston and Washington, DC. An obvious question is “Why not Android?!” No worries though as there will likely be a wider rollout in the future with extensions to Android, seeing the increased workload that Facebook has put into their Events app over the past few months.
With all of these new changes coming to Facebook Events, it will be quite interesting to follow the progress to what advancements are made over time, and I’m sure everyone is dying to get their hands on the new platform. By giving the community this option Facebook is definitely gaining more of it’s worth in the consumers eyes. What this is truly remarkable for is the fact that event organizers also have a much more powerful platform to work with when it comes to coordinating their events. You can almost assume that if Facebook is your main avenue for attracting visitors, then you can expect a higher attendance count overall from your efforts. In my opinion, this is a match made in heaven. For the rest of us not in the listed major cities, we will be waiting tirelessly for Facebook.
Zack Rivera, Marketing Advisor
