- Let us decide if we want to broadcast activities to our Facebook friends
There was a time when we became aware that Facebook started broadcasting all our activities to our friends. Some people even shared instructions and asked friends to turn it off. Now friends that follow us see all of our activity in their newsfeed, period.
When we complain about the customer service on a company’s page, our friends are allowed to see it, but should Facebook automatically show it to them? Here is an example of someone who created a page for his alter ego “Satan” as a workaround for this issue. As he mentions there, you can see pictures and videos of him on the page, so he’s not hiding, he created the page to deal with the broadcasting issue. A Facebook profile is part of our “online brand”, shouldn’t we be allowed to manage it more effectively? There are many ways to get people to be more active on Facebook, broadcasting all the activities to their friends doesn’t sound like the best approach to me.
- The newsfeed needs a switch for “friends” and “other”
You can prioritize who to see first, but you still get a mix of posts by friends you have connected with on Facebook and pages you liked. There is a clear distinction between the types of post I want to see, namely friends and the rest. Shouldn’t we be able to easily switch between the two? Sometimes people share a link and every now and then they add a message. When we share their post, now we are just sharing the link, not the message they attached to it. What if it was their comment that made us want to share.
- Give us some information on engagement on our posts
Twitter does this and it’s awesome. Sure, I understand that Twitter is a different type of platform, but when you post something on Facebook, you still want to get some engagement. Within closed Facebook groups, you actually get to see who looked at your post. This is pretty intrusive if you ask me. There is no way to look at the post without letting that person know you did. What I would like Facebook to do is show us how many times a post we shared has been seen (just like the impressions on Twitter), they don’t have to tell me who that person is. They don’t even have to do that in the closed Facebook groups. Would also be interesting to see how many times people actually clicked on a link we shared.
- Let us know how many of our friends actually follow us
Sure, I understand that you shouldn’t tell us exactly who unfollowed us. It would defeat the purpose. We don’t want them to know we stopped following them, but would we care if Facebook gave them the statistics? Probably not. When someone isn’t getting any activity on posts because none of their friends follow them, wouldn’t they eventually stop sharing things on Facebook? Wouldn’t that make them feel depressed? I get that it’s difficult to turn that number around, but to me this means that you have to work on giving people more ways to fix this. Wouldn’t it be great if we had a feed of “what we are missing”, allowing us to start following friends again with just 1 click? What you have to do now is look at your friends’ individual timelines, that’s too much of a hassle. People who unfollow someone are probably not going to start following them anytime soon and from Facebook’s perspective, that’s a bad thing. This is why Facebook introduced the “see less of this friend’s posts” feature. You get this option now after you hide their post.
- Allow us to change a picture afterwards
We can already edit our comments, so how is it any different? It isn’t. The better the experience, the more active we will be on Facebook. The problem is, you just won’t find out unless you try and when you try and we love it, there is no way back. This is why we can’t change our profile picture without broadcasting it to our network. Wouldn’t it be better to have a check-box, so people can disable it when they want to?
One last thing. The blog post titled “The Real Story Behind Facebook Moderation and Your Petty Reports” made me think about the report feature. Don’t remember ever reporting content on Facebook, but I understand that too many people are sending in false reports. When someone wants to report something, why not let them know that it has already been flagged? Let them know which category has been chosen and ask them if they agree. Now nobody can let you know that the content is actually appropriate, all they can do is report it. Having an algorithm to check if a report is valid is fine, what I would try to do is try to give the algorithm more information to work with.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]