As a Steemit user you already know that Steemit is the first blockchain based social media platform in the world that enables us to create content and participate in social networking. Unlike other social media platforms, Steemit gives a financial value to our content in the form of STEEM cryptocurrency with it's voting system. Social media giants such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram never gives a value to your content. Instead they earn billions of dollars from your content through advertising. This is the unique selling point which helped Steemit to become so popular within just 2 years.
Today I am going discuss about potential features which Steemit team can add to become the number one social media platform in the world by beating current leaders such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Please note these are just my personal opinions that I think Steemit can exploit.
1. Friends and Chat
Steemit currently has the ability to follow other users. While keeping this feature active, Steemit can add a friends feature which allows the people to send friend requests to the people who they personally know. Then adding a separate feature to chat with the friends would be really interesting as the people who are addicted to Facebook chat can now easily use the same feature here in Steemit. Paying STEEM for enhanced features in chat is an option which Steemit can consider in order to give more value to STEEM.
2. Post of the Day/Week/Month
I know that there is a trending posts feature to give the priority for good content. However, I believe that posts with quality content should be rewarded with more STEEM as an incentive to make more and more great content and contribute to the Steemit ecosystem. Daily/weekly/monthly staff picked posts would be a really great way to encourage Steemit users to create great content and get extra STEEM for their contribution. If I am not mistaken, there is no social networking site does this kind of appreciation for the top contributors at the moment.
3. Ability to Trade STEEM with Other Cryptocurrency and Fiat within Steemit
Currently we can trade only STEEM and STD within Steemit market. However, if STEEM and STD can be traded with other cryptocurrency it will provide a greater liquidity to STEEM and STD currencies and the users can easily buy or sell STEEM and STD using bitcoin and altcoin without going to an external cryptocurrency exchange. I personally believe that cryptocurrency is the future and fiat currencies will die soon. Since, majority of the people are still not familiar with cryptocurrency, adding STEEM to fiat trading pairs could drive more liquidity for STEEM and STD. Steemit users will be able to cash out their earnings without having lengthy processes.
4. An Affiliate Program
If you know about Binance which is the most popular cryptocurrency exchange in the world, gained millions of customers to their exchange within few months thanks to their attractive affiliate program. If Steemit can implement such an affiliate program, I believe that it would be a game changer. None of leading social media platform use an affiliate program to attract new users. Steemit can offer commission to the affiliates in STEEM for the STEEMs gained by the new users who referred to the Steemit platform by its affiliates. It's a really good free marketing tool.
5. Steemit Ads
I know that most of Steemit users love Steemit as we don't see annoying ads like in other social media networks. However, STEEM price should rise in order to give the Steemit users more value for the content that they create by letting the STEEM price goes up. Steemit can implement their own ad platform and accept ads and advertisers have to use STEEM currency as the payment method.
In order to keep the Steemit users comfortable with these ads I would suggest just to add one text advertisement in the post and below the post is the ideal position as we should give the priority for the content over ads. 468x60 size for the desktop users and 300x50 size are suggested as they are not annoying like other ad sizes. Since there is just one ad in a post it will really accelerate the price of STEEM due to the competition among the advertisers.
However, I would like to give the Steemit post author ability to turn off ads for his/her posts. As an intensive to keep the ads on, Steemit can distribute a portion of ads revenue to the Steemit author as well. Post readers who don't like ads should also have a feature to disable seeing ads. Steemit can give better curation rewards for the post readers who don't disable seeing ads in order to encourage them to keep ads on.
I think adding above features will give Steemit the potential to become the largest social platform. I would like see your opinions and suggestions as well. Thank you for reading this post.