If your Facebook Marketplace listings aren’t getting views or aren’t selling, then this article is for you. In it, we’re going to break down three real-world examples of items in the exercise space, home furniture, and tech space so you can clearly see how you could quickly improve your Facebook Marketplace listings to increase your chances of selling your items.
What makes a good Facebook Marketplace listing?
If you see my prior articles on Facebook Marketplace, you know that I’m a big champion of making sure that your listing is positioned for success.
- The first thing you’ll need for success is a keyword optimized title. This is where you want to include things like the brand or the model of the thing you’re selling, the color, the condition or anything relevant that will catch the potential buyers’ eye as they are skimming through all of the Facebook Marketplace results.
- Aside from the title, you also need to list your desired price. I’m a big champion of making sure that you offer a fair price with relation to what people can find for that item, either on Facebook Marketplace or some other online marketplace. Typically I price things competitively a little bit lower than the average in the market. That way I know that my item will more likely sell a little faster than everybody else’s.
- Aside from just title and pricing, you need to have some high quality photos. It needs to be super clear for your potential buyer what exactly they’re going to be buying when they check out your listing. An easy tip to make your pictures pop is to hit that auto wand function if you’re on iOS or to just use the one click touch up features of different photo editing softwares.
- Other things to include in your listing is writing in benefits towards your buyer. Too many people talk about the specific features that the item that they’re selling has, but they don’t write about it from the lens of the buyer. For example, if you’re selling a grill, you might include a line along the lines of, enjoy the summer sun while grilling some steaks on this fantastic Weber grill.
- The other three things I’m a big proponent of sharing in your listing is the percentage savings that somebody stands to save by buying your item as opposed to something new, as well as your preferred payment method, whether that’s Venmo, cash, et cetera, and the preferred pickup days and times.
Example #1: Myx Fitness Bike
Our first listing example is going to be for a Myx Fitness Bike. In case you don’t know what these are, they’re essentially knockoff Peloton bikes that are sold a little bit cheaper than a Peloton. If you’re interested in my marketing lessons that you can learn from Peloton, check out my recent article on that.
But aside from that, let’s go over this description of this listing and see what we could potentially improve. So here we can see that the listing title is Myx Fitness Bike. It is properly listed in sporting goods, under cardio equipment. And we have the like-new condition selected as well as the brand, which is Myx fitness.
And if we read the description, it says, “the bike is only three and a half weeks old, I really liked the bike and the classes. The only issue is limited alternative and rock music, which has been an issue for my fiance. So we decided to purchase a different bike.” I bet you, that’s a Peloton. “It’s very quiet, sturdy, and I’ve gotten great workouts. I won’t be sad at all if we end up keeping it. We live on a third floor apartment with no elevator and the bike weighs 150 pounds, includes a heart rate monitor and all the tools the bike came with.”
If you’re a subscriber to my channel, you know, the importance of these three acronyms WIIFM, PIE and ANA. WIIFM is what’s in it for me, PIE is, is it personal, insightful or emotional, and ANA is understanding your audience, their needs and having a clear ask. Knowing these three acronyms is a great way to think about these listings and how we could improve them.
So the first thing I noticed is that this entire listing is written from the lens of the seller and not the buyer. In other words, it’s talking about the backstory behind this bike, but not about the benefits that the potential buyer could have by buying this bike off of them.
Honestly, the story of the item is important, but what’s more important is the future story of this item if you were to be the person that bought this item from the seller. Other things to notice is how it’s difficult to skim this listing. It’s a big block of text, which makes me much more likely to just ignore the text altogether and move on to the next listing.
Aside from that, the seller could also benefit from including the savings that you could have from retail if you were to buy this bike, as well as how many rides were actually put onto this bike within that three and a half week time period. The seller could also do without that line on, “I won’t be sad if we end up keeping it.”
I understand what they’re trying to do here. But it’s not really that compelling in this listing because if that were truly the case, then why would you even be listing this bike? Okay. So now that we’ve gone over what could be improved here, let’s come up with a quick listing description that could potentially be more effective than this initial listing.
So the first thing I do is I changed the title to something along the lines of, Myx Fitness Bike-like-new condition-includes heart rate monitor. The reason why I do this is just because it is much more descriptive than the current title. Once we’ve dealt with a title, we can start breaking down the description. I would probably include lines like, “Looking for a great at-home workout? This Myx Fitness bike is for you. And it’s perfect for those looking for budget conscious Peloton alternatives.”
The reason why I include this line here is so that we can optimize for the keyword phrase Peloton as well in case somebody is looking for that, as well as just trying to position this bike more from the lens of the potential buyer, as opposed to just from the seller’s lens.
Another line I’d include is, “Save 12% off retail and three to five weeks of waiting for your next spin workout. Only three and a half weeks old, seven lifetime rides on it. It’s pretty much new. 11 months of warranty remaining on it, includes polar heart rate monitor. Pickup only. Third floor apartment, any day of the week. Venmo only.”
Something I want you to notice is as we made our way further down into the listing, we included all of those answers to commonly asked questions that a potential buyer would have for us. Aside from the overall improved listing, there are two other things I would potentially do to improve this listing.
The first thing is I would potentially revamp the picture so that it provides a little bit more variety than what’s been provided. The other thing I do is I potentially record a short video detailing the Myx library experience. It would just be potentially some of the classes and things like that, just so that people could get a feel for what Myx feels like if they were to compare it to something like Peloton.
Example #2: Bookshelf
Here we have a listing called, Bookshelf for sale. It is listed in home goods, within bookcases, which is a great categorization. We also are clearly using the condition and color, which is also great. So here we have, it’s like new condition and it’s brown in color.
And then the description itself says, “lightly used bookshelf for sale, dimensions: 121 inches base. Each shelf is 81 inches. Height 180 inches. Width 11 inches. So overall I’d say they’ve done a good job of using some basic tags, as well as making it clear to the potential buyer, what the dimensions are of the bookshelf in case they want to make sure it fits into their apartment or home.
That said there are a couple of things we could do to improve this listing. The first thing we could do is we could provide a few more pictures. In this situation, the single picture is not really giving me a complete sense of how this bookshelf would rest in a room or the different angles in which one might look at this bookshop.
It might also be helpful to include a picture of how many books it can hold. That way you could actually understand how many books does 81 inches of shelving actually support. We could also improve this listing by saying exactly how old this bookshelf is just that we have a better understanding of how long this bookshelf has been around for.
With these things in mind, let’s go ahead and try to rewrite this listing. For this one, I title it, “Unique Brown Bookshelf, like-new condition, living room furniture.” The reason why I do this, instead of just saying bookshelfs for sale, I want to include some more keywords that could potentially come up if somebody were, for example, to just be looking for brown bookshelves or something like that.
From here, we might go ahead and start running a description like, “Looking for great bookshelf to add to your living room? This Brown Bookshelf holds more than 50 books enough for the bulk of your library. Bought new two years ago, for $350, meaning you save a hundred dollars. It’s a real wood shelf, dimensions are 121 by 11 by 180 inches. Shelf length is 81 inches, which carries around 20 books each. Pickup only any day of the week after 5:00 PM and Venmo only.”
So by just taking a couple minutes to improve our listing here, we’ve made it much more clear what the savings are versus buying a bookshelf new here, as well as how many books this bookshelf can hold. And some other key things that weren’t in the original listing.
Example #3: HP Pavilion Laptop Core i7
In this example, we have an HP Pavilion laptop with a core i7 processor, and the description reads as follows. “8th generation Intel i7-8550U processor, 512 GB SSD, 16GB SD Ram DDR4, Nvidia GeForce 940MX. It’s listed with an electronics and laptops, which is great. And they use like-new condition as well as, they list the brand of HP. You’ll notice as we go through these pictures as well, that they include the original box in this listing, as well as just a breakdown of some of the other features that weren’t listed in the description.
So in thinking about ways we can improve this, one of the first things we could do is share how much we spent on this laptop retail. This way, we just have a better sense of how we are pricing this listing when we are putting it up on Facebook Marketplace. Aside from just talking about the retail price of the laptop, we might want to talk about the condition a little bit more. I understand that it’s listed as like-new, but it would be relevant to include anything. If there’s any nicks or dings that have happened over the use of this laptop.
Because this is an electronics purchase, it’s important to know how old it is, whether or not you’re going to be including all of the relevant power cables as well as if the laptop will be coming to you wiped or if the hard drive will need a hard reset when you are purchasing from them. So with these considerations in mind, let’s go ahead and rewrite this listing to make it much more compelling.
For this one, I’m going to title it, “HP Pavilion laptop core i7 processor ,like-new, 512 GB SSD, 16 GB RAM.” Again, you’ll notice here that what I’m doing with the title is I’m being as specific as I can and getting as many opportunities to keyword optimize it for the search results.
From here for the description I wrote, “Whether you’re a student looking for the perfect laptop for school or just a great performing gaming laptop, this laptop might be for you. Excellent condition, no dents or scratches on any of it. Comes with power cable and the original box. Laptop specs: 8th generation Intel i7-8550U processor, 512 GB SSD. Already factory reset, 16 GB Ram DDR4, Nvidia GeForce 940 MX graphics card, DVD optical drive. Bought new three years ago for $1,100, meaning that you save 45%. Pickup only any day of the week after 3:00 PM. Venmo only.”
So hopefully by looking at this improved listing, what you can tell is that I’ve answered way more questions that any potential buyers would have for my Facebook Marketplace listing here. And I’ve also made it really clear what condition the laptop will be when we arrange for a meetup in the case where I am truly interested in buying this laptop.
Something that I also think is great to include in the improved listing is just the retail savings because if you were to tell somebody you’re about to save 45% off a laptop, it would make somebody more likely to perk up their ears.
Aside from this improved listing, the two other areas that I could potentially improve this listing would be by including some more compelling pictures. These pictures that were taken are not necessarily bad, but they also could be brightened up or just given a little bit more contrast and made to pop a little bit more. Because this is a higher end purchase, having some really great pictures can be a great way to help your listing stand out from the rest of the pack.
Another thing that could potentially be helpful would be to run a speed test on this reset laptop. That way somebody could just get a general sense of how fast they can expect this to be.
Big takeaways
There are two things I want you to remember from this article:
- The first thing is that sales is all about positioning and the same goes for Facebook Marketplace. It’s ultimately how you position your listings versus all of your competitors that will make the difference between you selling today and you selling two weeks from now or not at all.
- The second thing to remember is that you should always aim to be better than average on Facebook Marketplace. As you can tell from the examples today, there are a ton of average listings and it only takes one or two minutes to really improve your listing to make it stand out from the rest of the pack. When you take that extra one or two minutes to improve your listing, it makes a huge difference in the amount of time it takes for you to sell your items.
If you found this article helpful, be sure to check out my YouTube channel to get new videos every single week I’ll help take you from zero to self-starter as you grow your business, get more customers, and hone your business acumen. Also, feel free to share this with anybody that you know that might benefit from learning Facebook Marketplace tips and tricks.