You know the competition is getting fierce when Facebook starts testing new features to keep its well known First Place as the best social media platform. Pinterest is one of the newest social media platforms and it’s growing so quickly and becoming such a favorite for marketers that Facebook is being forced into doing something to make sure it keeps the engagement of over a billion followers. With this in mind, Facebook is testing a new feature called “Collections”.
The Facebook Collections is designed to allow marketers to add “Want” or “Collect” buttons to their news feed post about products. While Facebook is stating that it is not in competition with the quickly growing Pinterest, it sure does look like it on paper. Being able to share products to a “Wishlist”, users will be able to have a feature for products they are interested in that goes above and beyond what Pinterest is currently offering. Currently Pottery Barn, Wayfair, Victoria’s Secret, Michael Kors, Neiman Marcus, Smith Optics, and Fab.com are using this feature and if they find it successful it could just turn into your new way for making money online for your business.
For users, Facebook Collections will allow them to share what they want with their own newsfeed and set up collections of products they want in their own Collections. Not only does this allow marketers the opportunity to feature their products on their Facebook page, it will allow for word of mouth advertising as users “Want”, “Like” or “Collect” the products. This will make it easy to track consumer interests and could breath an entirely different life into Facebook analytics.
While this is great news for social media marketers to capitalize on their marketing through Facebook, they will need to keep in mind that Facebook Collections, just like Pinterest, is an image driven feature. This means service based businessess might want to figure out how to offer their service as a product in order to take advantage of the new marketing tool, and of course having high quality images will be needed to gain potential customer’s interest.
While the official release date for when all Facebook business pages will be able to use Facebook Collections is not confirmed, it is something all social media marketers should keep an eye out for. In the meantime, collecting great images and figuring out how to post them in a way that will not come across as blatant advertising would be a great task to start considering.
