Expert Feature: A Letter to Santa Wishing for Better Social Media in 2014
Dear Santa,
The consultants at Roaring Pajamas created this Christmas Wish List in the hopes that you’ll add all our favorite features to our favorite social media networks. The Big Day is just days away and we’re very excited about the possibility that you can create World Peace. If that’s not possible, we’d settle for unsecured, easily accessed Wi-Fi in every coffee shop, restaurant, store, parking lot, airport, mountain, sporting venue and deserted island on the planet.
While we’re waiting for the ultimate network to be completed, we’d like our favorite social media networks to add some much-needed features. We know you have connections with our friends at Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Google, so here’s our Wish List for Social Media in 2014.
- Give us timelines that never flicker. . . . Ooooh, the frustration of scrolling down a profile only to have it completely freak out and move the screen to some other year.
- Give us the ability to see a complete list of fans on a business page in a single list, and more than just a few at a time.
- Create terms and conditions around bad reviews on posts (or any posts for that matter) that are clearly written by people who are not customers. See Google’s conditions, for example, where they don’t allow 3rd party reviews and they must be specific to the product.
- Don’t chop off our photos on the timeline. Currently, we’re forced to create collages using 3rd party apps to make everything fit.
- Those pesky #hashtags aren’t quite working. Either fix them or get rid of them. They’re annoying the way they – don’t – work very well now.
- Fix the mobile app so it works just as well as the website.
- Please – oh please – increase the reach of a business page’s post! We’ll buy ads anyway, but we work hard to create interesting, engaging content for our readers. We shouldn’t have to pay to promote every single post, Santa. Seriously.
- Lighten up on the restricted following on Twitter. We don’t mind the daily limits, but minding the gap is really difficult and very high maintenance for brands. As an alternative, please build in tools to allow us to see people we’re following that are not following and/or engaging with us. Yes, we know we’re not supposed to follow just to get follows. Seriously, Twitter, that’s the reality for small- to medium-sized brands. We’re not spamming or following too many people, so why not lift the gap limits?
- Create built-in analytics like Facebook Insights. Have you seen Insights? That feature is awesome, useful, helpful and truly wonderful. We want Twitter to be even more wonderful, too.
- Make the website work as well as the mobile site.
- Allow links in posts!
For Mrs. Claus’ sake, please return all those penguins, pandas and hummingbirds to the zoo where they belong!
That’s our list. We probably missed a few things, but we don’t want to look too greedy.
Merry Christmas!
[Feel free to add your wishes to the comments below!]
