Wednesday, November 29, 2023
Strategy

Ideas for Facebook and Twitter

There is one thing specifically on how I think Facebook can leverage on news, content/information or interesting articles online. And maybe also try to become the world’s most used search engine after Google and current second place, YouTube search engine.

By Liz Azyan , in Strategy , at June 7, 2011 Tags: , ,

WARNING: This is strictly from a business strategy point of view and observation.

Facebook article/blog post search and page

There is one thing specifically on how I think Facebook can leverage on news, content/information or interesting articles online. And maybe also try to become the world’s most used search engine after Google and current second place, YouTube search engine.

Facebook should allow users to set up pages for a specific article. Say if the article that broke the story of Ryan Giggs super-injunction had an actual page on Facebook, then people can discuss it with an article search. This gives people a place to talk without having to trawl the web but go straight to Facebook’s search engine. Or they could even go to community/company pages that are already featuring that article. Facebook currently displays shared links but takes you straight to the article’s website rather than a facebook forum page for that article.

We mostly find articles if we see a friend like it, but when will Facebook give us the opportunity or autonomy to find our own information that does not relate to a search by a company or community of interest but information that it offers?

For instance someone looking for relationship advice might not go to this Facebook page called “The problem with women.. is men” but the content of that page contains a wealth of information that can help both and men with their relationships (albeit the title may be a bit misleading and one-sided – read with a bit of humour)

The page is close to half a million fans and the writer of the page who is also the author of the book has tapped into a massive audience based on recommendations but imagine how much bigger it could get if people could search for content of his page on Facebook? BTW, he is about to get a TV Show talking about relationships because of the success of his Facebook page!

Geo-tagg

How about combining that with some geo-tagging. If say there was a story about Camden Council recycling service, a news ticker for all those living in Camden can be highlighted of top story/article pages that talk about a story being reported by say a local blog or website. Facebook can do a lot of things that can increase cohesion of a community and people that share interests with the vast amount of information that they have at their disposal by simply providing the platform to share stories/articles in a way that is more than just commenting randomly but to create a community of interest and connect people with similar interest semantically.

Twitter to follow Facebook group lists for tweet updates

I’m not sure about everyone else, but I love the Facebook friends group lists. They help to separate work friends, social friends and families on our friends list. Some updates are personal and doesn’t need to be seen by say work colleagues or social friends and are only family related.

Same goes for twitter. Sometimes we tweet, but we don’t intend to tweet that to EVERYONE on our list. Yes, I do agree the randomness sometimes does catch my interest but other times, some tweets are personal or a bit too random and we don’t want to tweet that to our business relations, work colleagues or people we haven’t met in person.

Allow a filter of hashtags on timeline

As Twitter grows to be a conversation tool for all and for everything under the sun (becoming commercial), I think Twitter better start paying attention on making the platform as ‘non-spam friendly’ as possible to avoid losing its ‘shine’.  I’ve already heard 5 friends closing their Twitter account, thinking Twitter has gotten too saturated and lost its plot. Its like fat, too much saturated fat is never good for the soul. Now 5 may not seem like a lot. But in the world of social media, numbers grow quickly and it shouldn’t be taken lightly.

Twitter lists taken to another level

We all know about Twitter lists, it was hot and tasty when they first introduced it but what happens next? Do we just continuously create lists without having any use for it? Why can’t we dedicate a tweet to a specific list? We painstakingly create these lists to acknowledge people who make the cut but what can it do a part from recommending others to follow the people on the list? It might be an idea for Twitter to start letting us tweet only a particular list  if we wanted to? It could possibly revolutionize the way we talk on Twitter. It could even increase productivity in how and what we say in this wonderfully open world.

We continually try to compartmentalize our lives to keep up with things and make things less messy. So why not compartmentalize our tweets? 🙂

Hope this was useful!

Liz xxx

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