Facebook seems to come up as a main topic in many of the articles that are written by countless marketing news websites, but that is simply because of the constantly changing state of their marketing offerings. They are constantly coming out with new ways for marketers to use their network for their needs, while at the same time they continuously screw up their existent marketing tools. Today, I heard about some new features that have been in the works with Facebook that might interest marketers and brands that use Facebook for their marketing needs. They involve consumers sort of taking a step further past Liking a post or picture on a company of brand page.
According to Inside Facebook and Tech Crunch, Facebook has been testing out some new features that they call “Collections” posts. These will be posts with images of products that will allow brands and businesses to include two brand new buttons. The first button is the Want button, and the second button is the Collect button.
People have been begging for a Want button for some time now, and now Facebook is offering it, despite it being in a different form from what consumers were expecting. However, the Collect button is something that I have never heard of before. It will allow consumers to keep track of the things that they have shown interest in, keeping the product fresh in their digital minds. Want buttons could also be good for marketers, in that they could show similar results as Likes do, letting marketers know what consumers actually Want.
Here is what Facebook told TechCrunch;
“We’ve seen that businesses often use Pages to share information about their products through photo albums. Today, we are beginning a small test in which a few select businesses will be able to share information about their products through a feature called Collections. Collections can be discovered in News Feed, and people will be able to engage with these collections and share things they are interested in with their friends. People can click through and buy these items off of Facebook.”
Now, the Collections feature sounds quite familiar to me. It sounds a lot like the entire idea behind Pinterest. Apparently, Facebook is insisting that the feature is not similar to Pinterest at all, but I feel like there is no way that Collections won’t end up as a competitor for the network.
With the Collections feature comes the Wishlist, which compiles all the Wants for consumers in a new Timeline section. People have been waiting for something like this for a while, be they marketers or consumers. Here’s some more good news about the feature though, reported by TechCrunch;
Retailers aren’t charged to share Collections posts instead of standard photos or status updates, and Facebook will not collect affiliate fees or a revenue share on purchases from Collections clicks. Still, the feature could earn it money.
It is useful, it will be effective, and consumers have already shown interest in the Collections feature. It’s another way for marketers to use Facebook, and another way for consumers to tell their stories on their Timelines.
