The Social Media Wish List: A Community Manager’s Top 10 Pet Peeves

When it comes to social media marketing and community management, it’s not always sunshine and hashtags. When you post daily, ad infinitum, there are little things that just can’t help but get on your nerves — especially when you encounter them multiple times a day, everyday. So, in the spirit of sharing, I’ve decided to share even this: a social media wish list that enumerates all the small things I wish would change about managing social media. Can you relate?

The Social Media Wish List

1. Hey Facebook. You’re great and all, but wouldn’t it be awesome if a brand could tag an individual?
2. Ah, the secret Pinterest board. Why can’t we change a secret board to public and a public board to secret? Pinners, amiright?
3. Speaking of Pinterest, can we get some keyword data somewhere someway somehow? I want to know what the people are searching for and optimize my pins accordingly.
4. It would be #instaperfect if Instagram could implement the ability to add a link in a post.
5. When posting as a company on LinkedIn, imagine if we could issue a hard return in the three lines of space we’re given! I know I’d be appreciative. It would also be great if we could tag anyone – individual or company.
6. When someone requests to join your network on LinkedIn and write you a custom message, that message disappears when you accept the request. The workaround, of course, is to find the notification in your actual email, but as far as LinkedIn is concerned, the message permanently vanishes.
7. While we’re on the subject of LinkedIn, why does Klout (leading social authority scoring entity) disconnect your LinkedIn profile every couple of months? What gives?
8. Posting on Google+ is always an adventure. Why, WHY does the posting box have to be so ferociously small? It’s like Google+ is trying to make it difficult. Moreover, when you hashtag something, you cannot hit the backspace key to edit it – Google+ automatically deletes the entire word.
9. TweetDeck is an amazing social management platform, but this list wouldn’t be complete without mentioning “collections.” Collections, or custom timelines as they used to be called, are columns you can customize endlessly. Drag and drop whatever tweets you want into them and create an appealing, embeddable timeline. It’s a beautiful thing, really. But once you create a timeline, you can’t get rid of – if you delete a collection, then it breaks in whatever blog post you embedded it in … which means you’ve got to keep that collection in your TweetDeck forever.
10. You know when you’re on Buffer and you’re posting messages way in advance? And maybe that promo for the Digital Marketing Conference Calendar can be exactly the same on Dec. 20 and Jan. 20? And you hit copy and paste? And then Buffer says “Whoops, it looks like you you’ve posted that one recently. Unfortunately, we’re not able to post the same thing again so soon!” Sigh. This is annoying and unnecessary.

What would YOU add to the social media wish list? Kvetch in the comments.

Kristi Kellogg is a journalist, news hound, professional copywriter, and social (media) butterfly. Currently, she is a senior SEO content writer for Conde Nast. Her articles appear in newspapers, magazines, across the Internet and in books such as "Content Marketing Strategies for Professionals" and "The Media Relations Guidebook." Formerly, she was the social media editor at Bruce Clay Inc.

See Kristi's author page for links to connect on social media.