Facebook’s collections are becoming shareable, just in time for the holidays

This holiday season, Facebook is hoping you'll use a relatively little-known feature to share your gift ideas.

With collections, users can already save Facebook content - whether it's a post, an ad, a video in Facebook Watch or a listing on the Marketplace. Now the company says that you'll be able to share these collections with your Facebook friends.

The idea is to turn collections into more of a collaborative tool. To do so, you'll need to open up a collection and then click the "invite" button. Then you can invite other users to become contributors to that collection.

A Facebook blog post explains how this collaboration might work:

If you and a group of friends are planning a holiday party, one of them can create a collection called "holiday recipes" and share with each person helping to plan. Those invited can add holiday recipes they've discovered on Facebook and save in the shared collection. The possibilities extend beyond the holiday season and can be useful for coordinating with friends on things like summer vacation planning, wedding registry ideas, furnishing a new apartment and more.

If you had no idea that this feature existed before now, I'm right there with you. Apparently Facebook has been testing "save" capabilities since 2014, which (quietly) evolved into the collections feature last year.

The company says "millions" of people are already using collections. Now that they're becoming more of a social tool, it seems that Facebook is ready to do more to promote them.