I don't personally follow any big brands on social media, but I do follow influencers who will occasionally showcase products or services they like — if you work for a small-to-medium sized company, this could be a good avenue to consider.
For a product I'll be launching this spring, I'm planning on using influencers as a way to drive brand awareness and engagement in the card game/board game community. Going to send them a prototype and ask for their candid thoughts and feedback!
or instance, you might take advantage of social media's targeting features to show social media ads to a certain audience based on variables such as age, gender, location, interests, networks, or behaviors.
Many organizations are building entire teams of people to do hyper targeted communications that will vary copy/articulation of benefits and even the time of day it's pushed based on user data.
Ebooks and whitepapers: Ebooks, whitepapers, and similar long-form content helps further educate website visitors. It also allows you to exchange content for a reader's contact information, generating leads for your company and moving people through the buyer's journey.
While much of our learning tends to focus on B2C marketing, much of my background is in B2B marketing, where content marketing leveraging eBooks and whitepapers is common, especially in the market research industry. To drive engagement with existing customers, and to drive prospects to our website for consults, we would use value-adding content like white papers to draw an audience, while simultaneously enhancing our brand as being an 'expert' in the space. This was one of the top ways we generated leads at my prior firms, and was generally pretty effective. But moreover, capturing the user's contact info supports database marketing techniques that are becoming increasingly popular. While Whitepapers may feel outdated, they remain fairly important in the B2B sector and don't see this changing until something better comes along.