Little-known Social Media Features that Boost Engagement

Once you come to grips with social media, the main functions of each network — posting, sharing, liking, commenting — become second nature. But there’s a hidden world of advanced features that can extend your reach and boost your profile.

Here are few of these hidden features that can improve the impact of your business across social media channels.

Twitter

The Twitter character limit has long been a source of frustration when it comes to targeting multiple influencers. Many brands end up tweeting the same message repeatedly with only the influencer’s Twitter handle changing. But there is another way.

You can tag up to 10 people in any photo you post to Twitter. What’s more, these tags don’t count towards your character limit, so you’re free to use your characters to include a marketing message, contact details, or a call to action.

Another little-known Twitter feature is the ability to mute accounts. This is especially useful when accounts are involved in Twitter chats and they tweet repeatedly over a short timeframe. The bonus is you still follow them; you just avoid all the unwanted noise.

Use the “Mute” feature to temporarily avoid unwanted tweets.

Facebook

On Facebook, you can combat the issue of nameless admins by featuring the real identities of the people behind your page activity. This can help to build trust in the business and helps to present your brand as honest and transparent.

You can also add featured pages (in Settings > Featured) to show off your relationships with partners or key customers.

Use featured pages on Facebook to show off your relationships with partners or key customers.

Embedding tweets across the web has become common. But you can also do the same with your Facebook content. As long as the post is public you can find an embed button beneath the post options. This offers a good way of obtaining content for blog posts.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn can be a fantastic way of growing your business contacts and connecting with potential business partners. But it can also be difficult to contact people directly without a Pro account or without them accepting your networking request. One hidden route around this is to join a common group, as group members can message each other without connecting.

To start the conversation simply join a common group and find a post from the person you’re interested in. You’ll find an option to reply privately — your route to a private message.

YouTube

There are hidden features on YouTube that can help boost your brand’s content.

First, you can share a video at a specific point. Say you have a video that has 2 minutes of boring footage before the relevant section appears. You really don’t want to share those first two minutes. To get round this, advance it to the correct time, click “Share,” and select the “Start at” time, which appears beneath the URL. Now when users click your video link, they’ll go straight to the good part.

YouTube’s second hidden gem is ideal for short attention spans and it applies to only a limited number of videos. This feature allows you to create your own animated GIF from a YouTube video. Once you’ve identified the video, click the “Share” button. Now click the GIF tab — beside the “Embed” and “Email” tabs — and select your start and end time as well as text to your GIF. Click “Create” and you’ll be given your animated image to share.