We all know how important it is to engage our audience on social media, but are you taking advantage of every feature available to you?

Here are five Instagram features that your business probably isn’t taking advantage of but should be:

#1: Close Friends

For a business, using the Close Friends feature is an opportunity to share exclusive content with your VIP customers! Here, you can offer discounts that aren’t available to everyone or share information about private events that are specific to your VIPs. Using this feature will give those followers a sense of exclusivity, making your product or service seem all the more valuable.

#2: Collections

This feature is a great way to capture user-generated content. You can also use it to take notes on what your competitors are doing. This can be utilized as a social media management tool that can help you save content that inspires you. You can also add other Instagrammers that you may be interested in collaborating with.

#3: Mute

Use the mute feature if you don’t want to see a certain person’s updates or stories, instead of unfollowing them completely. Yes, this is a great way to avoid your aunt’s political rants without an unfollow that could cause a stir in the family. But for your business, it can help you engage without seeing all the other personal accounts you may follow.

#4: Share

These days, it seems that many people are skipping their Instagram Feed and heading straight for the Stories. It can be hard to capture the attention of your customers by only posting to your grid. With the Share function, you can share Instagram posts to your stories. This will ensure that your followers are seeing your content. It’s a straightforward way to share your latest post while adding a call-to-action will help drive traffic to your profile.

#5: Live

Utilizing the Instagram Live feature is a great way to show authenticity. The video is in real-time and unedited. Instagram Live can be great for product tutorials, behind the scenes, showing a new product in use and services happening right in front of your audience. They are also great for allowing people to ask questions and get the answers right then and there.

Conclusion:

So now you’ve learned about a few Instagram features that will be helpful in your social media strategy. If you utilize these features correctly, you’ll be able to engage audiences in ways you never thought possible. Combined with other tried and true marketing strategies, these measures can make all the difference in your business’s success on Instagram.

Just remember to never forget why people are following you in the first place. If you develop interesting content and nurture relationships with them, people will want to follow you, and they’ll be happy to do business with you, too!

Written by Jasmine Padilla, Social Media Manager

I have been working in the social media world for over 3 years now. Empowering a brand to reach its audience through social media is my passion! I help businesses find their audience by identifying the type of content that resonates with their target audience, then creating unique ways to reach that audience and distributing it in a way that helps them meet their marketing goals. I believe that whether you are an established brand or just beginning to build a presence, social media can open businesses up to many new opportunities!