Facebook Gifts: the answer to your holiday gift dilemma?

Article written by *Stanna Johnson - Facebook users and marketers are more than used to the site making random updates about every three months or so. Some of them are great updates, benefiting everyone, and some of them are just thorns in the side of people who have just finished adjusted to the previous rollouts. So, where does Facebook Gifts rank here?

Gifts, one of Facebook’s newest features, allows residents of the United States to browse through different items to purchase for other Facebook users. The Facebook ads reminding you to purchase someone a gift may seem like an annoyance to many users, but during the holiday season, you can benefit greatly by using this feature. For marketers, you can actually benefit by using Gifts year round.

How Facebook Gifts Can Help You During the Holidays

Having your products listed as a Facebook Gift is not a super-easy process at the moment, but since this is a new feature it will most likely become a lot smoother in the near future. However, it’s worth looking into and it should vastly increase exposure for a retailer once set up.

Quick Shopping for Friends and Family

For a regular user—or even a marketer looking to be a regular shopper—Facebook Gifts provides you with an opportunity to pick up a great gift for the people you care about without having to browse around the entire Internet for ideas. It’s like Amazon melded with Facebook to create Gifts, and you can easily take care of your shopping needs while on-site.

Extremely Easy to Use

Although Gifts is only available to a US audience at the moment, that still hasn’t stopped it from becoming very popular. The reasons for the popularity: Everything’s contained in a streamlined interface. You don’t have to put any real effort into shopping. Facebook handles practically everything. Granted, you may be paying a few dollars more when compared to other sites, but since Facebook steps in and ensures the gifts are sent to other users, it’s too convenient not to appreciate.

Friends Trust Friends

Marketing to people can be taxing on you as a businessperson. Even when you use great apps like Qwaya, the customizable features available on Facebook, and other methods and apps to make things easier, it’s still hard work to create customers.

What you always want to do is to create content, whatever type it may be, that strengthens your brand and is something people like, comment on and share. In doing so, real people will do some of the marketing for you and spread the message to their network of friends.

Facebook Gifts can be a part of this strategy. If someone purchases a gift through you, this shows that you’re a real business that offers real products people want to buy. And to be honest, that’s not always the message you get from Facebook advertising. This will definitely earn you some loyalty points.

Facebook Reminders

If you are planning on doing some holiday shopping, some birthday or anniversary shopping, or if you’re planning on rewarding your loyal customers, Facebook won’t let an opportunity go to waste. You’ll receive a reminder about an upcoming birthday or holiday. You’ll be prompted to buy a gift. So if you are looking to use this innovative feature, the feature actually comes to you. You won’t have to remember everyone’s birthdays.

Not every marketer using Facebook has the money to spend on gifts for people. It is quite an investment. But whether you’re purchasing gifts for the people you care about or just looking to reward loyalty, Gifts is an investment that might be worth making.

Article was written by Stanna Johnson from Qwaya. Stan is an online writer and a social media enthusiast who loves to write about the latest social media trends. Feel free to leave your questions and comments below and she'll surely answer it.