The Newsstand May 2021

Facebook Marketplace’s new 'Holiday Mode' Gives More Freedom to  Handmade Sellers

This has been a common complaint from handmade sellers using Facebook Marketplace to sell their products. If vacations or family matters come up while Marketplace listings are active, people can still place orders and seriously affect your ratings because you didn’t ship the orders fast enough. 

That’s what this new Facebook Marketplace mode is trying to refine. By offering a ‘Holiday Mode’ on Marketplace, handmade sellers can pause their sales for however long they need to deal with life, go on vacation, or even focus on other platforms like Etsy. This function gives sellers more freedom than ever and allows them to focus less on the day-to-day stress of selling products and more on the big goals they have for their brands in 2021 and beyond. 

To use this new feature, simply head to your Marketplace settings and click on ‘manage holiday mode.’ From there, you can turn holiday mode on and off at your discretion. However, one thing social media expert, Matt Navarra, hopes to warn sellers about when using this mode is that all pending sales will still be active. This means that you will still be expected to fulfill any sales that went through before turning holiday mode on. Other than that, it’s certainly a great new feature to an already great tool for small businesses and individual sellers alike. 

Will YouTube Shorts Take Over?

Since the start of TikTok in 2016, countless handmade sellers and small brands have found tremendous success by using the app’s popularity to their benefit. From soap makers and bath bomb brands all the way to custom tie-dye companies and blacksmiths, TikTok users’ fascination with cool handmade products makes it a perfect place to market and subsequently sell products. 

However, as of March 18th, 2021, a new and strikingly similar platform from YouTube called YouTube Shorts launched in the U.S. Now, many companies with great success on TikTok are wondering if Shorts may be another new and effective marketing option to look into. 

According to Shorts product lead, Todd Sherman, not only will Shorts be an additional useful marketing tool for brands but may actually surpass TikTok in a matter of months alone. In India, where the product was first launched, The number of Indian channels using Shorts creation tools has more than tripled since the beginning of December and the YouTube Shorts player has racked up 6.5 billion daily views globally. 

Setting up YouTube shorts for your brand now may be the perfect way to establish yourself on this newly launched product before everyone else and work out the kinks before its popularity skyrockets. It’s always good to get ahead of the game with new social media platforms so get going and start creating the videos now!

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