We all know that the holidays are not about material gifts, but rather the gift of family and those we love. That being said, the month before Christmas is a good time to make your Amazon wish list a little more comprehensive and text your family members links to the all the gadgets and gizmos you wouldn’t mind seeing under the Christmas tree.
As professional social media mavens, our wish list at Transformation includes a little bit more than just the things you can pick up at Best Buy or JC Penney. We’re lookin’ at you, Mark Zuckerberg. We want Facebook features, Twitter updates, and other social media additions that will help us better meet the needs of our followers.
We’re sending this bad boy priority mail to Santa’s Workshop’s social media department. This is our 2016 social media marketing wish list:
More Twitter characters. It seems that since Twitter’s inception, the internet has been whining about increasing the character limit of individual tweets, but for good reason. More times than not, 140 characters isn’t enough space to get all of the desired text and hashtags into one single tweet. A few months ago, Twitter announced that photos, videos, gifs, and other graphics would no longer count towards the 140 character limit. This definitely helped (thanks, Twitter) but we could still use another sum of character space to get the job done.
Diversify Facebook newsfeed content. From a marketing perspective, there isn’t a whole lot to complain about when it comes to Facebook. For years, the Facebook community demanded a “dislike” button, and lo’ and behold, Facebook Reactions launched this past February. Since then, we’ve seen the integration of Facebook Live, Facebook Articles, and several other features that make our jobs as social media marketers much easier. However, as and end user, we’d like to see a more diverse mix of posts appear on our newsfeeds. After you like or comment on a particular post, you see more posts from that user and similar content in the future because of the Facebook algorithm. If you use Facebook a lot, it can begin to seem like you’re seeing the same people post about the same things all the time. We love you Facebook, but the last thing we want is for the user experience to become mundane.
Include links in Instagram posts. Instagram is quickly becoming the new Facebook, and with such large shoes to fill, we have a list of recommendations. The biggest one is the ability to include clickable links into Instagram posts. Currently, if you type or copy/paste a URL into an Insta caption, it does not become a hyperlink (something you can click on that will take you to another web page). This is especially irritating for marketers because Instagram is a great way to lead followers to your website, where they become apt to make a purchase. Users want easy, quick, one-way paths to new web pages; they’re not willing to navigate there on their own.
Scheduled Instagram posts. Another feature we’d like to see Instagram adopt is the ability to schedule posts ahead of time. It’s beneficial for a marketer to be able to create social media content and then choose the days and times it will actually be posted, so to increase its effectiveness. Twitter and Facebook already have features that allow business users to do this and although third-party scheduling platforms do exist, most of them make posting to Instagram difficult.
It’s easy to drum up a list of changes we’d like mainstream social networks to make, but there’s really no telling what kind of changes 2017 will actually bring. What we do know is that there WILL be changes, and there will be a lot of them. Social media changes perhaps faster than any other form of media because users are able to interact and evolve so instantaneously. What’s trendy one day is forgotten the next, and social networks can’t survive unless they’re constantly meeting the demands of their users.
As for you, Santa. We know it’s a lot to ask, but we think these features are really important to the future of social media. We’re gunning for those Twitter characters, but at the very least, a spell checker for Facebook trolls would be nice too.
Signed,
Your Marketing Superheroes at TM