Facebook has opened up Marketplace to paid advertising for the first time. The program, which launched under the radar in January, has had no promotion other than a couple of “how to” pages in the Facebook Advertiser Help section of the site. But the move is a nevertheless dramatic leap for Marketplace, Facebook’s rapidly expanding general classified business.
Not only does it put Facebook Marketplace on a functional par with apps like OfferUp and Letgo, which already offer their own options for paid premium placement (OfferUp calls it “bumping”) but, given Facebook’s vast social reach, the addition of advertising into Marketplace is a cross-network play not limited to just classifieds.
Facebook spokesperson Mike Manning (LinkedIn profile) made that clear in an exclusive interview with the AIM Group. “You can’t run ads just in Marketplace,” he told us. Rather it’s about “extending a campaign that starts in News Feed as an additional placement, in the same way you can extend an ad to appear on Instagram.”
That’s significant: it essentially allows sellers to think and act multilaterally. Not only can an advertiser extend from News Feed into Marketplace, but a seller who has in the past only thought about using Marketplace to offer items for free now has an easy pass to promote products across Facebook as a whole.