Every emerging brand knows that it needs to continually enhance its offerings in order to meet the demands of its consumers, and social media giant Facebook is no different. The social media powerhouse has been silently testing a beta version of a redesigned timeline in New Zealand. This version of timeline is lean; eliminating the large graphics in the followers, photographs and map tools area, and replaces them with smaller, text-only boxes. This upgrade is a rather small change to the network, but one that may encourage more users to engage and follow Facebook brand pages that interest them.
Facebook has invited the media and tastemakers to a March 7 event where they will unveil the platform’s latest features. And while we’re all anxiously awaiting the details, we’ve come up with a dream list of changes that would significantly help brands better utilize the platform:
Reconfigure the promoted posts feature
The concept of Promoted Posts is ideal: Reach more of your target audience who will ultimately benefit from your distributed content, which will lead to clicks, sharing and, ultimately, engagement at a higher rate than un-promoted posts. While Facebook’s initial reasoning for implementing this feature was to cut spam, many have come to a consensus that this is a revenue generating tool. If a user has taken the time to “like†your brand, you should be able to target those people instead of being forced to pay for non-fans and robots.
Let us color outside of the lines
Businesses spend a considerable amount of resources on creating their brand identity. It would be beneficial if Facebook allowed brands to choose different ways to arrange graphics, photographs and fonts.
Sometimes we need a do-over
We’re all human and make mistakes. Unfortunately, with Facebook pages’ current setup, brands are unable to edit posts without deleting, re-writing, or re-uploading images, and ultimately reposting. By allowing managers to quickly edit posts, the platform would be invaluable to page managers, which would allow them more time to engage fans, review metrics and possibly increase ad sales.
Give us more than 30 days
If you want to market, measure and track your brand page growth properly, you need insights and statistics from inception to present. However, if your brand page is a year or older, your insights are only kept for 30 days on Facebook. The solution is a tedious task of downloading insight reports every thirty days and storing them on a cloud or PC, or risk losing the data.
What are some features that you would like to see introduced to Facebook? Leave your comments below.
S. Lynn Cooper is a Washington, DC-based digital strategist and communications expert. Cooper is the founder and director of Socially Ahead, a strategic communications agency that specializes in the creation of social and digital strategies and campaign management. Follow her on Twitter at @sociallyahead.