It’s hard to ignore the importance of social media marketing in today’s marketplace. It’s the number one place where your customers and prospects choose to spend their time. Traditional advertising channels have lost much of their power to influence consumers, who have turned to social media for information and recommendations about products and services. No matter what niche or industry you operate in, you need to be active in social media if your brand’s messages are going to have any chance of being heard.

Social media offers you the opportunity to engage in relationship-building conversations with your audience, provide real-time customer service, and boost your search engine rankings all at the same time. While you’re probably already aware of the many benefits of social media marketing, chances are you’ve never even heard of a number of features of the Facebook and Twitter platforms that can improve your social marketing results while enhancing the experience for your audience.

Facebook’s Hidden Gems
1. Conduct a poll from inside groups and events. Even though Facebook removed the capability to run audience polls from your business Page status updates, you can still collect valuable audience feedback by polling users in groups and events. Click the “Ask a Question” tab on your status update bar. Select the “Add Poll Options” to create a multiple choice survey about your event, your post content, or anything else that will provide the data you need to manage your social marketing more effectively.

2. Customize the order of the sections on your business Page. Your People and About sections will always be at the top but the other sections can appear in any order that you choose. Simply hover with your mouse over any of the section heads on your Page until the pencil icon appears. Click on the pencil, select “Manage Sections,” and drag the section head to the position you want.

3. Search for targeted conversations by keyword. Just type in a few appropriate keywords into the search bar at the top of your Facebook Page to search for older News Feed posts about the topic of your choice.

4. Bookmark posts for reading later. Simply click the arrow in the upper right corner of the article you wish to bookmark and choose the “Save” option. You can save just about everything except plain-text updates and photos. To access a list of all your saved bookmarks, select “Saved” in the left-hand column of your home page.

Twitter’s Buried Treasures
1. Embed your presentation into a tweet. You can embed any SlideShare presentation, video, or document into a tweet so that followers can view your message without ever having to leave Twitter. The SlideShare material of your choice is automatically embedded when you link to it from your Twitter account.

2. Create a tweetable photo collage. The perfect option for those occasions when you need to display multiple photos in a single tweet. Create two, three, and four-photo collages from your desktop, iPhone, or Android. Visit the HubSpot blog for an excellent tutorial on creating Twitter photo collages on the device of your choice.

3. Manage your Twitter account through your SMS (text messaging) platform. Enable SMS functionality from your basic Twitter settings. You’ll receive a personal number for sending tweets as well as retweeting, replying to users, following and unfollowing.