Adding a new feature for restaurants and bars that currently promote their business using a Facebook page, the social network now allows business owners the ability to upload their entire food or beverage menu onto Facebook. Using a tool called SinglePlatform, restaurant owners can split up the menu to list different courses or types of food as well as list prices and details about each dish. Detailed within a post on the Facebook for Business blog, the service is open to all businesses within the United States and Canada. For anyone outside of those countries, Facebook is providing a tool that will allow page owners to upload a PDF of their menu.
This new feature would be particularly advantageous to restaurants that are still using Flash as the platform for the business’s website. As pointed out by QSRWeb, restaurants are abandoning Flash in droves due to the inability to load Flash on iOS devices like the iPhone or iPad.
Despite that trend, the percentage of sites on the Internet that still support some form of Flash element is around 16 percent. Rather than pay for a site redesign at the moment, a restaurant could list their menu on Facebook, as well as Yelp, in order to accommodate anyone that’s searching for information about the restaurant.
In addition, it’s likely that any search result for the restaurant with a Flash site would link to a social media page first in the listings since Flash isn’t very SEO-friendly. It’s more difficult for Google to crawl a Flash site, thus information about specific dishes may not pop up in a typical search. Flash sites are also expensive to maintain and typically require technical expertise when attempting to make simple alterations like changing items on the menu or changing the listed hours that tell the customer when the restaurant is open for business.
