The Future. Even though Gen Z has mostly stopped using Facebook to connect with friends, they do use its buy-and-sell platform Marketplace a lot to save money and be more sustainable. While Meta has been searching for a way to normalize social shopping across its ecosystem of apps, don’t be surprised if it starts to put an emphasis on Marketplace as a growth engine during its next earnings call.
Commerce requestFor young people, TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat are for play, while Facebook is for business.
Marketplace, which has over a billion monthly users, is the most popular secondhand goods platform behind eBay.
Although Meta doesn’t ever break down the user demos behind Marketplace, the platform has become immensely popular among cash-strapped Gen Zers and millennials.
That’s because items are cheap, it’s easy to barter thanks to the integration with Messenger, and there’s a level of trust that comes with profiles being connected to FB (with buyers and sellers also having ratings).
Yoo-Kyoung Seock, professor of textiles, merchandising, and interiors at the University of Georgia, says that Marketplace is dubbed “the internet’s garage sale” among Gen Zers.
Maybe a little buying and selling is what gets them using Facebook as a social network again.
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