Unfortunately, Facebook appears to have changed the functionality of the Book Now button on Facebook pages without informing us and we have heard of several businesses having issues as a result. Instagram pages are unaffected so far.
We strongly recommend reading this short guide to help avoid any issues. As always, if you have any questions, we are more than happy to help.
From what we can see, Facebook is transitioning Classic Pages to the New Pages Experience. If this happened to your page, you may have seen a pop-up message like this:
And your page will have a new look where the Home tab has been replaced with Posts:
In this new version, Facebook seems to have replaced the behaviour of the Book Now action button - instead of redirecting customers to your booking system, customers are prompted to request an appointment via Facebook's platform, essentially bypassing the booking system:
The Book Now button therefore no longer works as intended and could result in double bookings. To restore the connection to your booking system, please edit your action button as shown below:
And replace it with Contact Us:
Enter your booking system URL and save:
To find your website link, on the admin system, click My Website on the left-side menu and copy the URL from the address bar.
If you have your own (custom) website, just enter your preferred link.
The Contact Us button redirects customers to your booking system and so is functionally equivalent to the old Book Now button:
If you notice a Message button appears first or in its place:
You will need to delete it for Contact Us to take priority.
Important!
Even if you have the New Pages Experience but somehow retained the old Book Now button behaviour OR your page has not transitioned to the New Pages Experience yet, we still strongly recommend switching to Contact Us as we have received reports of Book Now not redirecting properly (e.g. on Facebook's iOS app for iPhone/iPad).
You can find out more about how Facebook describe the New Pages Experience here.
Please contact us if you need any further assistance.