How to Use Facebook’s Recommendations Feature

Since I'm on Facebook all the time, it's obviously one of my go-to places to share news with my friends or ask them for help with something. Ever since the social platform rolled out its recommendations feature, I've been seeing my friends use it successfully but I haven't been able to figure out how to activate and utilize it.

I have a trip to New York City coming up in February and would like to get recommendations from my friends on fun somewhat non-touristy things to do in the city. I thought the recommendations feature would be a great way to ask what fun things I should do there - you may have seen status updates like the one below with the label "Looking for Recommendations in [Name of City]," as shown below.

I thought maybe there'd be a button I'd push before posting a regular status update, but it turns out it's much more complicated than that - like a secret item on the Starbucks menu that you can only get if you read about it on Buzzeed. In a panic, I reached out to my friends for help.

Immediately people began asking me if I needed recommendations for a job. Ugh. To be fair, that's because some people still don't know about the recommendations feature, so maybe I'm still ahead of the curve?

Luckily for me, a few of my friends understood and were able to help me out. I guess Facebook uses artificial intelligence for this one, where it analyzes the words you type in a sentence and determines whether or not you're asking for a recommendation. So, simply typing, "Recommendations for what to do in New York City?" will give you the following.

You would obviously say "yes" to adding that map to your post because it will make it look SO much cooler.

I made the mistake of trying to be too complicated with my status by checking in to New York, New York. My friends gave me recommendations when they saw my post anyway, but it didn't activate the recommendations feature when I posted the following.

The above still works, but it makes me mad how complicated Facebook's recommendations feature is. Hopefully in the future Facebook will make it easier for us to utilize this tool, because it stands out in the News Feed for more people to see and therefore feel compelled to help ya girl out.

I haven't tried to get it to work since my friends went out of their way to post recommendation statuses of their own for the sole reason of sending screenshots to me, because I'm scared it still won't work for me. But if you want to try it out, don't waste your time searching further into Google for the answers because I just gave them to you. (Yes, I googled all of this beforehand and had zero luck.)

Good luck!