Facebook: The Missing Manual

Chapter 8. Going Shopping

As part of its quest to be the only Web site you’ll ever need to visit, Facebook offers its very own online classified ads: Facebook Marketplace. The Marketplace ads you can see depend on the networks you belong to. And—unlike the classifieds in your local paper or ads on Craigslist.org—you can use Facebook to learn about the person who placed the ad before you contact him. As you’ll see in this chapter, you can use Facebook Marketplace to buy or sell just about anything.

Note

Marketplace is a relatively new Facebook feature, so it’s not quite the seller-packed, go-to shopping haunt that Craigslist is—yet. (Some pundits predict it never will be.) What it is spectacularly useful for is facilitating local sales: those Chihuahua puppies you want to get rid of, those textbooks gathering dust in the corner, that on-campus job you want to fill. Anything of special interest to your friends or fellow network members is a prime candidate for Marketplace.

The Facebook Marketplace

Facebook’s Marketplace is a built-in Facebook application (Facebook Applications: An Overview) that lets you post and answer want ads. You can use Marketplace to advertise that you want to rent a house or sell a sofa—anything you’re either looking for or looking to get rid of.

Because you get to choose which networks to advertise in when you place a Marketplace ad (Facebook calls them listings), the ads you see are ones you’re most likely to want to respond to. In other words, if you browse through ...