With such a variety of social platforms each serving their own individual purpose, with many pros and cons to all, they are ultimately striving for the same goal. This said goal is to make the world a more social place, to increase the engagement and sociability of us as individuals, brands and businesses. To make the World more connected through instant sociability.
All platforms are a route to vast amounts of social sharing and with rich and powerful content constantly being developed; you can create large loyal followings and unparalleled brand awareness. It is how each social platform continues to differentiate its offering that carves its way into either someone’s very busy, yet active lifestyle or a multi-million pound marketing strategy. Either way, they have all been massive drivers in real-time marketing.
Packed full of already amazing features, tips and tools designed to streamline the process, here is how I think 5 changes to the undeniably great Twitter could make the platform even more superior…
#1: Trending Topics Filter
It’s nice that every time you log on to Twitter, you get to see which topics are trending in the world, but they are very rarely useful. Twitter could be clever with your followers and topics to provide different levels of trending. They could keep the overall trending topics but also sub-categorise, for instance trending music stories. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to filter these topics by niche or category? That way you can keep track of what’s hot and trending in your field. What influencers are looking for – Less waffle more time to take care of social business.
#2: Lists that don’t Publish to Profile
Following lists is fun, but it’s a bit of a hassle wading through one-on-one person spam. Instead, why not allow users to publish exclusively to certain lists? It would increase list popularity, improve hashtag use, and make for a true second location to visit on Twitter. No one wants to see these posts on your profile.
#3: Can and Can’t See Profile Tweets
We always check out someone’s profile before following, but a lot of the time – you can’t make sense of it. When you start a conversation with one person on Twitter, it litters your profile with conversation. All the good stuff ends up hidden. Instead of choosing between a great profile and a good conversation, why not add in a tweet profile editor, where you can show or hide certain tweets?
#4: Text links in tweets
With a 140 character limit, it’s often difficult to have links in a tweet without robbing yourself of precious characters. By allowing users to tweet hyperlinked text, not only will it give them a little bit more room for including additional characters, but will also make Twitter feeds look cleaner.
#5: Display meta data through hover tooltips
A tooltip is an effective graphical user interface element that allows users to view more information when they hover or click on a text or object of interest without having to leave the current web page. They enable information gathering with fewer clicks and fewer pages to visit. One way tooltips can be helpful is in seeing the bio information of a Twitter user when you hover over their username on your Twitter feed. If you see a username mentioned in an interesting Twitter update, simply hover over the name to see more information about the user that was mentioned. Perhaps more desktop orientated but an idea none-the-less.
Now all we can do is let the Twitter updates continue rolling in from one operating system to another…
