Dear Mr. Mark Zuckerberg,
First of all, we at Grow To Win Marketing, love Facebook. It is the only place where we can go to communicate with our friends, coworkers, classmates, and acquaintances all at once. It is also allows us to target our exact audience. The targeting gets better and better every day. While it may appear somewhat complicated and complex to use, those who understand how to use it are getting great results and return on investment. Facebook is always improving, which is one of the main reasons I took the time to write this letter. I think Facebook is open to suggestions and is always trying to innovate, so hopefully some of these suggestions are adopted. It will make our lives a little easier and hopefully make Facebook even more profitable than it already is. So without further ado, here are the suggestions:
Allow Us to Save Post-Campaign Optimized Audiences
Companies who are involved in Facebook marketing know that Facebook optimizes ad spend over time. The longer the campaign goes, the more efficient the spend becomes. Facebook should allow us to clone and save that optimized audience. Whatever Facebook is doing behind the scenes, whether it is showing the ad to middle-aged men in the evenings that like a certain page or whatever the metric is that the optimized campaign ends up with, we should have the ability to “save” that setting and give it a name. This way, next time we launch a similar campaign, we can see if that optimized audience and campaign will be cheaper than if we started from scratch all over again. Yes, we can extend the existing campaign, but sometimes you want to be able to change images and words without losing all of that optimization. Businesses lose some efficiency restarting campaigns that should have been optimized from the beginning.
Give Us a More Organized Way to Post in Addition to Chronologically (Timeline)
Facebook should give us another format that is category-based with which to post updates. It shouldn’t always be in a status/timeline format. The current timeline format gives us the “post it and lose it” syndrome where some users may not like posting quality content because it won’t stay easily searchable forever like a blog post will. It will get buried to the bottom of the newsfeed never to be seen again. This is problematic because it encourages people to write blogs instead or post on Tumblr as to retain the quality content and make it easy to find. Facebook should set up a tab on the profile that lets us organize our posts with labels and categories. We should have the option to organize our posts in a blog-type format that enables better engagement and interaction. Another idea is a forum-type format where people can engage each other based on a topic in a forum section instead of posting on a profile and losing the post the next day. There has to be another way, other than chronologically, to allow us to organize and find our content.
Dump Power Editor Now
Get all functionality of Power Editor and have it go into the regular ad platform. Power editor is brutal to work with and not very easy on the eyes. I would say improve Power Editor, but why? Just get rid of it and put all the functionality into the standard ad platform. Too easy.
Give us a Calculator on the Ad Platform
Just like Quicken has a calculator that automatically pops up when calculating financials in their software, Facebook should do the same. This will be more profitable for Facebook as I am often finding myself going to Google to use their calculator in order to calculate ad spend changes. The way Facebook can fix this is when we click on a dollar input field, then we type a number, followed by an arithmetic symbol (+ -* /), an automatic calculator pops up and we would then do math within the ad platform itself. This will keep us on the task of spending money with Facebook and will add great value to the platform.
Give Us The Option to Set Campaign Budgets
The new Facebook ad set capability that began this year has been very helpful. Currently, the ad spends are done at the ad set level and not at the campaign level. It would be helpful if we could set campaign budgets in lieu of ad set budgets (give us the option).
Give Us the Option to Auto Optimize Campaigns
With the advent of the Facebook ad set, the campaigns are no longer auto-optimized by CPC or CPM. I am asking Facebook to give us an auto-optimize option for campaigns. Everything would go the exact same initially – ad sets would get equal status. As a certain percent of the ad set money is spent, the campaign makes a minor adjustment to favor one ad set over the other. Then each day the campaign goes on, eventually only one or two ad sets will be in play and the others will be on hold. This will save Facebook from having to flood the system with nonperforming ad sets, and will give more value to advertisers, thus increasing ROI.
Let Us Choose By County in the Ad Platform
At present, we can only choose by city and zip code at the local level. Some counties have about 20 cities in it, making it difficult and time consuming to set up the ad. It would be nice if we could choose by county. A lot of businesses and political candidates operate at the county level. It would be a lot easier to target by that size of a location.
Provide More Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Help
Facebook should give users help within the Google Search algorithm. Currently, all of the content on Facebook is “no follow” (meaning they don’t pass any link juice to our web pages). However, Facebook should give page owners the ability to “do follow” at a minimum our website link once we reach a certain amount of likes on our page. This way Facebook can ensure the page is a quality page and also encourage the page owner to be active in order to get his/her likes up to a certain required number. Additionally, if a post is quality and is going viral, Facebook should have the post become a “do follow” post. This would encourage page owners to post relevant, quality content for users. Currently, people are posting content elsewhere (blogs, for example), in order to get the “do follow” status of their links. It is hurting Facebook because people have a need that Facebook isn’t providing. Facebook would get a lot more content if this small change was implemented. Right now, a lot of SEO-friendly posters are posting on Google Plus, because Google Plus provides some SEO value. If Facebook competed with Google on the SEO-side, it would get more traffic from both Bing and Google and would take a larger market share of the content.
Give us a 5-10% Facebook Cash Back Credit Card
Facebook ad spends are done on credit card. Facebook should give businesses the ability to have a Facebook credit card that gives us 5-10% cash back when spending money on Facebook. Ad budgets are usually huge and credit card companies would line up to partner with Facebook on this. The financial industry is a great industry for profitability. Additionally, studies have shown that people spend more when they know they are getting good rewards on their spend. Facebook stands to gain a lot of money finding a good credit card company with which to partner. I suggest Chase or Capital One – they have the best and fastest rewards programs out there sending EFT or checks right away. I will note that Amazon has a credit card with Chase, and people can spend their reward dollars right in the Amazon portal.
Let Us Have Labels
Give us color-coded labels that we can apply to anything on Facebook to help us organize better. This idea came from Gmail and Microsoft Outlook, but my idea is actually better than those platforms. For example, we should be able to color code all of our family members with a certain color (let’s say yellow). If there are posts from our family members, the yellow square would show up next to their post. We can click on that yellow square and that takes us to seeing only our family members’ posts. When looking at our friends list, we should be able to drag and drop this yellow label on all of our family members seamlessly. We would then pull up all albums or photos that include our family members we have identified. When looking at comments on posts from our family members, there would be a yellow square next to their name. When family members send us a PM, there would be a yellow square next to their message. When family members invite us to events, those events would be color-coded with a yellow square on our events calendar. This applies for business associates, close friends, acquaintances, or anyone else we feel like categorizing. We would also be able to post to that category much like we can post to lists currently. This would make our Facebook so much more organized and useful.
Give us the Auto-Hash Tag Option
Google+ posts an auto hash tag whenever you post content. Facebook should let us enable that option on pages and profiles. This will help Facebook organize the newsfeed better, it will help us get the main take away of a post from the very beginning, and will help us get more followers and traffic organically (as people will find us when they search that particular hash tag).
Let us Bookmark Posts
It is really hard to find a post after a few days go by. You can’t remember which friend’s wall it was on, whether it was on a page, or whether it was in a group. It is gone. Facebook should have a button on each post that lets users bookmark the post. It could easily bookmark in our browser or within an organic Facebook bookmark system. This would help users retain quality content on Facebook. Pinterest is a good example of why this is important. Let us “pin” posts somewhere on our profile either privately or to our friends.
Provide More Post Formatting Options
At a minimum, allow users to bold, italicize, and underline content. Text colors would be an added bonus, but I can see how this might conflict with some of the ads out there. Give us more formatting options within our post. You already allow us to have emoticons and such. This would give more variety to the posts and would help break up the monotony.
Give Pages an Easy Auto-Post Feature
Set it up so that pages can auto-post on a predetermined schedule. Therefore, in our admin panel we would select every weekday at 7 am and 3 pm. So when we post, we can either post now or just hit “autopost”. The autopost will automatically fill the post to hit at the time slot we determined. This would save the hassle of having to click ten times to set up a scheduled post.
Give Page Owners Analytics by Post
At this time we have page analytics available to us. But it would be nice to have demographic and interest information about people that are engaging on a particular post. This would help us target an ad spend to promote that particular post. It would provide more value to the advertiser, more value to the customer, and more value to Facebook overall.
Help Us With Irrelevant Post Creep Prevention
We have had posts go viral on Facebook. One of them was an April Fools post that went on for something like 10 days in a row. So long after April Fools was over, I was still getting comments. Except some people thought my post was real because it was hitting their newsfeed long after April 1st. This has happened several other times with other posts that were no longer relevant. My suggestion is for Facebook to either establish an algorithm for posts that have gone on for more than 24 hours to have a higher scrutiny of being relevant, or for Facebook to give the user the ability to “turn off” a post if they no longer wish it to hit people’s newsfeeds. People would be able to leave the privacy status alone, but turn off newsfeed publication. Something needs to be done about posts that are clearly no longer relevant.
Give Us a Resume Function
At this time, LinkedIn, Monster, and other job sites are where people go to find and be found for hiring. But Facebook could capitalize on this market as well. If Facebook added a resume feature to the about section of the Facebook profile and incorporated a resume-type search function to the Facebook search, this would increase value for users. Further, it would quickly take market share away from LinkedIn. People will be able to search their friends list for jobs instead of reaching out to people they don’t know. This will provide even more value to connecting with someone on Facebook. Facebook could help fight unemployment and joblessness. It would be a beautiful thing.
Incorporate Facebook Alerts
A lot of times our friends post about topics we want to know about, but we may miss the post. We need the functionality to set up Facebook alerts much like Google Alerts. For instance, if a user is a lawyer he may add “lawyer” as a keyword. Facebook would send him an email, text, or notification anytime one of his friends posts about lawyers. This would help people get more business from their friends and will help them connect in a more targeted manner. If people love garage sales, they can get an alert for “garage sales”. If someone likes baseball cards, they can set an alert for “baseball cards”. If they are into politics, they can set an alert for their favorite issue or politician. If they like a movie or book, same thing. It is for whatever people care about and helps them stay on top of things better.
Allow Us to Find the “Friends of Friends” Feature More Easily
Friends of Friends posting selection used to be very readily available. But now it is almost impossible to find on mobile and you have to make like three steps to get it to show up on desktop. Friends of Friends is very useful because it is almost like making a post public, but not quite. It gives the maximum exposure without surrendering your content to the public domain. Friends of friends is really helpful and Facebook should bring that back.
Give us a More Robust Search – A Facebook Search Portal?
Facebook graph search is a great tool. It does something that the others don’t do. But it has its limits. We can’t search posts. What if Facebook had a page labeled http://search.facebook.com (for example) and it was one screen just like Google’s? Except in the Facebook search, it incorporated all of Facebook’s posts and data. Keep the page very simple. Call it Facebook Search. It would directly compete with Google. Let us have an advanced search option and make it more robust helping us find posts, comments, and keywords. Let us check off certain things we want to find within our newsfeed, on our friends’ newsfeeds, and in the public domain. Facebook currently only lets you search people and specific things about people. It is a great people search. But very little content can be searched. Facebook search needs more options – especially considering all of the data Facebook has at its disposal.
In Summary
Facebook is great. I am convinced it is helping the world connect at a cheaper and faster pace than ever before. Advertisers are finding their niches easier, customers are seeing more relevant ads, and friends are keep up-to-date on the people they care about. This experiment, Mr. Zuckerberg, is a huge success. My ideas are just another way to improve an already awesome product. The better we can make it, the faster people’s lives will improve. People will be able to reach anyone they want for a fraction of the cost. Competitors like Google, Amazon, Twitter, and LinkedIn will have to innovate even more to keep up with Facebook.
Thank you and respectfully,
Spence Rogers
Grow To Win Marketing
Tampa, FL
Update – 10:34 am July, 3rd 2014
This article was mentioned in several news publications. Here are some of the links:
Reuters
Yahoo Finance
Street Insider
Digital Journal
Global News Wire
Morningstar
