Facebook pushes feature for sharing holiday gift wish lists

Dive Brief:

Facebook has introduced a feature allowing users to share collections of saved content with their Facebook friends, a capability aimed at helping people share holiday wish lists with family and friends.
The new feature expands on the collections feature that Facebook began rolling out more than a year ago to enable users to save, organize and find content, such as friends' posts, content from pages they follow, ad content, Facebook Watch videos, or Facebook Marketplace listings, the company said.
The new collection sharing feature will be rolled out over the next week. In addition to being able to view the content, friends that users share the collection with also will be able to add their own posts to the shared collection.

Dive Insight:

Facebook has positioned this new feature as a holiday-related launch, highlighting that users can share holiday wish lists, party invitations and holiday recipes. Though there is plenty of the season left, it's a little surprising that Facebook didn't try to make a bigger splash with this announcement by launching it in the days leading up to the long Thanksgiving shopping weekend.

The social network may also just be looking for new ways to get users to interact with the platform in ways that add value to Facebook, by sharing ads, videos and posts that may have links to Facebook Marketplace partners.

Facebook users have been asking for the ability to share collections, the company said, adding that daily users of the feature number in the "millions." Though, the company has not touted the feature much over the year that it has been rolling out. Facebook isn't the only social network that has a collections-style feature, as Pinterest has boards that serve the same purpose.

Social network competition is no longer about who has the most users, but who has the most powerful engine of social commerce. More than half of consumers are believed to have purchased something through a social network, according to an Avionos study from earlier this year. Facebook may not be an obvious shopping destination just yet, but it's becoming a powerful enabler of commerce for the brands that partner with it. Still, it needs to keep finding new ways of inspiring users to continue talking and sharing, especially if it's related to what they are buying or plan to buy and from whom.