Facebook is now piloting a program that can bring reviews from top food publications to select pages across the US. With partnering with big media outlets like Buzzfeed and the New York Times to publish content for their Instant Articles, Facebook is partnering with trusted foodie publications like New York Magazine’s Grub Street and Eater.com in showcasing restaurant reviews alongside search results for restaurant pages. Along with the professional reviews, Facebook will enable publishing reviews from users’ Facebook friends along with crowdsourced opinions from Facebook users. This seems to be a strategic for Facebook’s part in moving into local search and service reviews, which is an area that is currently dominated by sites like Yelp. In addition, Grub Street post has placed Facebook in direct competition with Yelp by naming the new feature “a cure” for “crowdsourced opinions from Yelp”. In February, Facebook had begun testing a feature that is aptly called “Place Tips”, which offers suggestions for nearby businesses based on geo-location. Place Tips when coupled with enhanced reviews will naturally go hand in hand, which makes the enhanced service a real contender in the discovery service area. This statement comes from Josiah Humphrey, a co-CEO and co-founder of Appster, an app development company. It could be that a combination of Facebook’s recently added mobile payments combined with review and search features could place the social media giant in a prime position to offer local goods and services in the vein of GrubHub or Amazon. No matter where the future of Facebook’s content-meets-search-meets-crowdsourcing experiment lies, local businesses should be ready to cultivate winning reviews on the social media site or be left behind. “Smart restaurants that are well versed in social media will start putting resources towards Facebook,” Humphrey says. “You have to be proactive about it, and that’s the responsibility of the company. It’s just how we should be doing business in the 21st century. [Facebook reviews] are just more work at this point.”