We all have our Wants, right? Wants for life, our families, our careers, our pastimes.
In my world, social media is both a career and a pastime. I represent several clients on several social media platforms. I share in social media posting activities for my business. I also post to my own social media profiles.
Social media platforms are constantly evolving, for better or worse. In the past, features that I’d hope would become available on various social media platforms eventually did. But there still are some things I’d love to see added to my most used social media accounts because I think these features and functionalities would improve the user experience and, in some cases, increase the number of people or businesses who would create and regularly utilize those profiles.
8 Social Media Features I’d Love to See
Instagram finally got around to allowing users to edit photo captions, which was a huge (although quite basic) improvement. Now I’d love to see Instagram make it possible to:
- Easily switch between accounts like so many other social media profiles do. This would make it easier for people to add a second account (for their business) to their personal app, and also allow for easier social media management of a business account.
- Make it so you can choose to disallow a current Follower of yours, from seeing your photos. Instagram users who have protected accounts need to grant access to their photo stream on a user-by-user basis. But if you allow someone access to your photos and then change your mind down the road, your only option (currently) is to block that user.
I always feel kind of bad for LinkedIn because it’s a “social media profile” that’s serving a very traditional, previously-offline, professional function. Resumes, cover letters, recommendations, and business networking can get a bit tricky when trying to translate all those features into an online, social format, and when trying to compete with the other major social players in the space. My biggest frustration with LinkedIn has to do with its Company Pages. In order to make it worthwhile for a company to establish and grow a LinkedIn Company Page, LinkedIn needs to:
- Offer more capabilities to Company Pages. Outside of posting status updates as your company and responding to comments left on those updates, there’s nothing else to do with your Company Page.
- Bring back Company Product and Service listings as well as Recommendations. LinkedIn had these features then stripped them out, making Company Pages more pointless than what they already were.
The youngest of the major social media players, Pinterest is unique in a lot of ways. Known for the virality of its pins, and quick to monetize and add analytics (in comparison to other social media platforms), its recent redesign was a step back in my opinion. I think Pinterest needs to:
- Improve its search function. It was better before. The real issue is for searches involving more than 1 word (which is quite often). Pinterest will match on any 1 word in your phrase, and if you try to put your entire search phrase in “”, like what works on Google, Pinterest still separates out those words individually.
- Add more categories. It would be stellar if “social media” was a new category that was added.
- Add the ability to search users by location. This will help local and regional businesses connect with users who are part of their target market. It’s very, very hard to do so without identifying users’ locations.
Google+
In an effort to please the Google Search Gods, some of the savviest Google+ users have turned to writing rather lengthy updates. These updates are so long that they realistically could be blog posts. Quite often, these lengthy Google+ updates are chock full of really good info, links, and insight, and leave me wishing for a way to save them for future reference. That’s why I wish Google+ would:
- Add a “Save” option to their drop-down menu. You already have a bunch of options available via the drop-down menu located in the top right hand corner of an update. Simply add “Save” to the list, and we’d be golden!
All in all, I’m pretty satisfied with Twitter. It’s stayed true to itself over time, it’s figured out a way to make images work on the platform, and it integrates nicely with other services. The exclusion of Facebook from this list of Wants, however, doesn’t mean (by any stretch of the imagination) that I’m in any way pleased with my personal Facebook user experience, or my experience as a fan page admin. However, changes needed to improve Facebook are too numerous to list, and never going to happen.
Facebook aside, what changes would you love to see be made to your social media platform favorites?
