Latest Social Media Features No Brand Should Miss in 2024

Like it or not, staying updated with the latest social media features and trends is crucial for how modern consumers, especially Gen Z, perceive your brand. 

You might already feel overwhelmed by the constantly evolving social media landscape and while we don't want to alarm you, this fast-paced environment is here to stay. The key to thriving in this dynamic space is to have a structured social media management approach and a dedicated team that can monitor new social media features and help you make the most of what's relevant. 

In this blog, let's find out exactly that — the top social media features your brand must be aware of and leverage in 2024. 

6 Impactful social media features for businesses   

Here are five of the most impactful social media features modern brands utilize.  

#1 Content sharing (and Resharing) 

At the heart of your social media strategy is content sharing. Regularly posting engaging, relevant and meaningful content is the key to staying in tune with the ever-evolving social media algorithms. When harnessed correctly, these algorithms can make your content go viral, reaching both your target audience and those you haven't yet tapped into.  

Resharing content is an underrated social media feature. It's not just about reposting your own content, but also about sharing content from others that aligns with your brand. This practice significantly boosts the chances of your content going viral, increasing your brand's visibility and reach. 

🔧 How to use it: Generate top-notch, educational and engaging content that resonates with your target audience. Utilize diverse content formats to appeal to various tastes and preferences. Experiment with popular topics, hashtags and challenges to enhance your reach and potential for virality.  

📱Available on: All major social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.  

📈 Impact: Compelling content can spark conversations, foster brand loyalty and attract new followers. Achieving virality can significantly amplify your reach and brand awareness. 

#2 Interactive engagements 

Social media features like polls, Q&A sessions, live videos and interactive stories enable you to create a two-way conversation with your audience. This direct interaction humanizes your brand and increases social media engagement, as followers are more likely to participate and share content that involves them directly.   

🔧 How to use it: Incorporate features like polls, quizzes, live streams and Q&A sessions into your content strategy. Encourage your audience to participate by asking questions, seeking their opinions and responding to their comments. Use social media stories and reels to create interactive and engaging content that captures attention.  

📱 Available on: Instagram, Facebook, X, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, etc.  

📈 Impact: Interactive engagement boosts user participation, enhances the customer experience and builds a stronger community. For example, contests and giveaways can help promote user-generated content and increase brand awareness and recognition. Over time, these followers become brand advocates, actively supporting and engaging with your posts in the comments section. 

#3 Paid advertising and social commerce 

Paid search and social commerce are powerful social media features that have revolutionized how brands reach and convert their target audiences. Paid ads allow you to precisely target specific demographics, ensuring that promotional content reaches the right people at the right time. Meanwhile, social commerce integrates shopping features directly into social media platforms, streamlining the path from discovery to purchase.

Features like shoppable posts, in-app checkout and product tags in social commerce make it a breeze for consumers to purchase products directly from social media without the need to leave the platform. This effortless experience not only boosts sales but also enhances customer satisfaction by streamlining the shopping journey.  

🔧 How to use it: Develop targeted social media advertising campaigns using detailed demographic data to reach your ideal audience. Utilize retargeting strategies to re-engage users who have interacted with your brand but haven't yet converted.

📱 Available on: Facebook, Instagram, X, Pinterest, TikTok, LinkedIn, Snapchat and more. 

📈 Impact: Paid advertising and social commerce drive higher conversion rates and sales by targeting the right audience with personalized ads and providing a seamless social shopping experience. These strategies also enhance brand visibility and customer engagement, making it easier to turn social media followers into loyal customers.   

#4 Community management  

Effective community management involves actively engaging with your audience, responding to comments and messages and fostering a sense of belonging among your followers. This proactive approach helps build a loyal, engaged community that advocates for your brand.  

🔧 How to use it: Regularly monitor and engage with your audience on social media. Respond promptly to comments and messages and create content that encourages interaction. Use social listening to understand your customer sentiments and address any issues or feedback.  

📱 Available on: Sprinklr offers a community forum software that helps you build and manage a customizable forum for customers to easily interact with each other, share solutions and recommend product improvements. You can try the platform for free. 

📈 Impact: Effective community management builds trust and loyalty among your audience, enhancing customer retention and satisfaction. Influencer marketing expands your brand’s reach, increases credibility and drives higher engagement rates.

#5 Collaboration 

Social media collaboration, a highly popular social media feature, allows brands to partner with other brands or creators to amplify their reach and engage new audiences. There are two primary forms of collaboration: brand collaborations and creator collaborations.

Brand collaborations: Brands can collaborate to co-create content, run joint campaigns or cross-promote products/services. These collaborations leverage the strengths and audiences of both brands, resulting in increased exposure and credibility.   

Creator collaborations: Collaborating with influencers or content creators enables brands to tap into their followers' trust and influence. By partnering with creators who align with their brand values, you can reach a targeted audience authentically and drive engagement.   

🔧 How to use it:  

• Brand collaborations: Identify complementary brands with similar target audiences. Develop mutually beneficial partnerships that showcase shared values or complementary products/services.  
• Creator collaborations: Research and select creators whose audience aligns with your target demographic. Collaborate on content that resonates with both their followers and your brand message.  

📱 Available on: Platforms like Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and LinkedIn facilitate brand collaborations through features like co-branded content, sponsored posts and joint campaigns. Creator collaboration platforms such as CreatorIQ and AspireIQ provide tools to effectively find, manage and measure influencer partnerships.   

📈 Impact: Collaboration is not just about expanding your brand's reach, it's about enhancing your credibility. By associating with trusted partners or influencers, you can foster authentic connections with new audiences. This strategic move can also generate fresh content ideas and innovative marketing approaches that resonate deeply with consumers, solidifying your brand's position in the market. 

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#6: Analytics and reporting

As marketers, you know that social media campaigns are significant investments of time and money. Tracking performance and measuring social media ROI is crucial to ensure these efforts are worthwhile. This is where the power of social media analytics comes into play. Leading social media platforms offer detailed analytics, allowing you to track various metrics and gain valuable insights into your campaign's effectiveness.

Social media analytics tools compile this data into comprehensive reports, making it easier to analyze trends, identify areas for improvement and showcase the impact of your social media campaigns to stakeholders.   

🔧 How to use it: Monitoring important data points like reach, interaction, follower growth, website visits and conversions is considered primary but basic these days. To gain a competitive advantage, delve deeper into audience behaviors and underlying intent. Here’s how social listening tools help you:  

• Conduct precise analysis of billions of conversations across all social media platforms instantly.  
• Identify recurring patterns in human emotions, behaviors and factors driving sentiment.  
• Discover trending topics and discussions by measuring sentiment and volume.  
• Analyze demographic and psychographic data, including interests, habits and opinions.  
• Gain predictive insights into future trends and receive recommendations based on data analysis.  

📱 Available on: Every major social media platform provides its own analytics dashboards. However, modern social listening tools are essential for deriving insights from vast amounts of unstructured data and gaining a holistic view of your brand's social presence across channels. These tools automatically surface themes, trends and anomalies from billions of data points while enabling you to compare your social performance and executive and influencer presence against competitors.   

📈 Impact: Data-driven insights empower brands to refine their social media strategies, enhance content effectiveness and maximize ROI. By understanding and leveraging these insights, you can run more effective campaigns, improve engagement and strengthen your social media presence.

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7 trending social media features missing on every platform  

Despite the continuous evolution of social platforms, several key social media features are still lacking in most of them, which brands otherwise would have loved. Let’s take a look.   

1. Social listening: Social listening involves monitoring social media discussions to track what customers discuss regarding your brand, industry and competitors. It is essential to discover how people feel about your brand, monitor trends and create content that resonates with your target audience.  

2. Sentiment analysis: Social media sentiment analysis can be considered a subset of social listening that employs artificial intelligence to identify the emotional context of social media discussions. It is beneficial for gaining insights into public perception of your brand and offerings.  

3. Automated community management: Various social media platforms provide automated community management tools, but they have restricted capabilities. Enterprises require advanced tools for automated community management that can assist them in automating tasks like replying to comments and messages, moderating content and planning posts.  

4. Seamless cross-platform content management: Juggling multiple social media accounts can take time and effort. A unified social media management tool accessible across all platforms would streamline the process of scheduling posts, responding to comments and analyzing social media metrics. This centralized hub would allow brands to maintain a consistent voice and messaging across all social channels. 

 😊 Good to know 
 
With Sprinklr's social media publishing tool, you can seamlessly create, store and organize content. The tool allows you to bulk upload assets, search for specific content and seek approvals—all from a single, streamlined space.

Additionally, you can publish across 30+ channels simultaneously. The tool lets you preview posts, make channel-specific customizations, schedule content at AI-recommended times and boost posts through ads.

Try Sprinklr Social Now!

5. Interactive content experiences: Interactive content formats play a larger role in driving engagement on social media. A solution that works across all platforms enabling brands to create AR filters, shoppable quizzes and interactive polls, could increase engagement and encourage conversions.  

6. Personalized user experiences: Personalization is the key to the future of social media. So, brands seek to deliver a personalized brand experience to each follower by customizing content recommendations, product suggestions and targeted advertising based on individual user preferences. While platform algorithms can influence your feed based on browsing history, personalization can further enhance your experience by tailoring content and recommendations specifically to your interests.  

7. AI-powered content creation and optimization: AI can transform content creation on social media. Imagine a framework that utilizes AI to examine audience data for content creation, proposes the best times to publish your posts on social media and even automatically customizes captions and hashtags. This could streamline the release of your marketing assets, enabling your company to concentrate on more strategic endeavors. 
 
Read More: 8 Best AI Tools for Social Media Content Creation (+ Examples) 

Feature-driven success: How leading brands excel 

Success is achieved by learning from and drawing inspiration from the success stories of others. Here are three examples of brands leveraging social media features for business: 

• Sephora 

Sephora's strategic use of Facebook and Instagram Live features for mini-programs, interactive beauty tutorials and product showcases is a testament to its commitment to engaging its audience. These live broadcasts create a unique space for viewers to interact with beauty professionals in real-time, ask questions and even make direct product purchases, fostering a sense of community and connection.

Source  

• Glossier 

Glossier has established a significant and faithful fan base on social media as a beauty brand. The company leverages social media to share user-generated content, organize contests and giveaways to motivate customers to showcase Glossier products and engage with customer reviews and inquiries. Glossier's approach to social media demonstrates how a brand can leverage social platforms to cultivate its community, building customer trust and loyalty.  

Source  

• Patagonia 

Patagonia is a popular clothing brand dedicated to environmental activism. The company utilizes social media to promote green practices, showcase its sustainability initiatives and engage with like-minded customers. Through its posts, Patagonia also acknowledges photographers, videographers, sponsors and other collaborating companies. Patagonia's approach to social media is an excellent demonstration of how brands can leverage social media to foster brand loyalty. 

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To learn more, check out the 10 best social media marketing examples for inspiration. 

Use all social media features within a single platform 

Juggling multiple social media accounts and utilizing different platform features can feel overwhelming. That's why social media management platforms such as Sprinklr Social are important. Here's how it helps:    

• Schedule posts and manage content across all major social media platforms  
• Monitor brand mentions and social conversations in real-time  
• Engage with followers and respond to comments and messages  
• Run targeted social media advertising campaigns  
• Track key performance indicators (KPIs) and measure social media ROI  

By consolidating these functionalities under a single unified platform, Sprinklr Social not only simplifies social media management significantly but also provides a sense of convenience by eliminating the need for multiple logins.    

Stay ahead of the curve and let Sprinklr do the heavy lifting

Social media is a wild ride—it’s always evolving, with new features popping up everywhere. Mastering these features helps you create compelling content and foster genuine connections with your audience, hitting your marketing targets with precision.  This blog keeps you updated on all the latest social media features. However, if you need something prescriptive, our experts are here to help. Schedule a demo today and discover how Sprinklr Social can streamline your social media strategy.