The 4 Most Underutilized Features for Brands on Social Media

I recently read an article about how to increase Instagram engagements for a business and the first tip was to “post interesting content.” This struck me as both insanely obvious as well as being akin to saying “if you make your movie watchable, then people will go see it.”* Sure, a large part of social media success is creating and curating compelling content but there’s so much more that goes into ensuring that not only do people actually see it but that your desired audience does as well.

*Unless you’re Vin Diesel and then you can make the same bad movie 12 times and mouth-breathers all over the world will come out in droves.

While creating great content will always be the first step towards social media success, we wanted to share four underutilized social media features for brands and businesses that can take your compelling content and ensure it reaches future clients/customers. These features are all either wildly underutilized or used incorrectly so incorporating them into your social media strategy will significantly improve your odds of success. 

Facebook Audience Builder

While audience targeting on Facebook was always relatively simple, it has become substantially more limited over the last five years and that’s an advantage for savvy business owners if you possess the right data about your existing customers. Most business owners are content to just use core psychographic data when choosing an audience to advertise to (ie: if you’re a gourmet food company, you just target people who like gourmet food) but if you’re able to make logical inferences about your existing customers based on data, you can use that information to create audiences that reach people who may not know your company exists. The folks who eat gourmet food likely exist within a certain tax bracket, probably like things ancillary to gourmet food (think: luxury items), and live a lifestyle that can encompass any number of higher-end interests that you can target as well to broaden your audience of those most likely to become customers. 

Your target audiences are not something you can just “set and forget” and should be regularly updated based on the insights gleaned from data. At Nuera, we’re a part of a Facebook Agency Marketing program that allows us to work with a dedicated Facebook rep and it has been invaluable for insights into their ever-changing platform–most notably the changes to the Audience Builder.

Twitter Lists

Twitter lists are especially useful for companies that want to position themselves as thought leaders in their space or just want to keep in touch with what their most evangelical customers are saying to stay top of mind. Twitter lists allow you to engage with customers, clients, and thought-leaders while sharing their content with your own thoughts and perspective. Outbound engagement is a core tenet of Nuera’s social media strategy and Twitter lists allow you to identify content relevant to your business and then insert yourself into a conversation on the platform that is the most conversational.

Instagram Reels & Stories

Remember those halcyon days when Instagram was all about the grid on your feed? Those days are all but over. As Instagram continues its push into more immediate, video-based content, its algorithm is placing more and more emphasis on Reels and Stories. The ability of any brand to add links to Reels and Stories is perhaps the most important and underutilized feature on this list.  Not only can businesses use a platform that prides itself on immediacy to humanize their brand, they can now do it while also driving users to a conversion point. As both users and the platform evolve, it’s these two features and the ability to add links that will help drive the way for brands.

LinkedIn List Uploads When Targeting An Audience

LinkedIn isn’t at the same disadvantage as Facebook for audience targeting and therefore allows you to be far more granular than any other social media platform when advertising a post. One of the greatest tools at your disposal on LinkedIn is the ability to upload a list of people based on titles, emails, industry, and company because your audience of prospective clients can be as broad or as narrow as you want. This feature also allows you to coordinate with your sales team to reinforce the message they’re using to sell prospects by not only targeting those same people but by targeting people in similar positions at similar companies. We use LinkedIn extensively for a client in the fintech space and the moment we began uploading lists to our target audiences, we saw a whopping 26.5% increase in monthly link clicks. We’re a data-driven company and you certainly can’t argue with an increase that was not only immediate but substantial. 

In a world where social media platforms change or add features seemingly overnight, these are the four that we’ve found are most underutilized by businesses. There is so much opportunity for businesses to use these relatively simple features to not only make an impact on their bottom line but to draw a line in the sand against their competitors. We’ve seen them work time and again for our clients and look forward to staying ahead of the inevitable changes that are implemented by the time this is published.

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