10 Unusual Ways to Use Social Media for Promotion Your Business

It pays to think outside the box if you hope to make your message heard on social media.

Social media has become ubiquitous. You can hardly take a virtual step outside the door without tripping over it in some way, which is why it is an excellent way to promote your business.

The problem is, a lot of people think so, too, so it can take quite a bit of creativity to get noticed. Here are 10 unusual ways to use social media to promote your business.

1. Be Picky

You know how you get tired of reading about that great sale or interesting article when you see it everywhere on social media, or successive posts promoting different things on the same website?

You learn to recognize it because they all start to sound formulaic. There is nothing really wrong with having a formula as long as you don't over-use it.

Instead of promoting every post you put up, try mixing it up a bit by promoting just one out of every seven on social media, and taking time to do it well.

That way, you can concentrate on doing another six great posts from Essay Scholar Advisor that gives value to your visitors without making them numb or indifferent to your social media announcements.

Less is more, so to speak.

2. Get the Ball Rolling

Nothing ensures engagement more than asking people their opinion on something. This gives them an opportunity to participate, and gives you a chance to connect with them on a personal level.

Post topics that are likely to interest them and ask the right questions. For example, if you have a restaurant, ask your audience to vote on three or four dishes you, and the one with the most votes will be incorporated into your menu.

As an added incentive, offer a free meal to one of the voters of the winning dish, or a 10% discount to all those that voted if they order the new dish.

Asking them to weigh in increases the chances of getting their support, and you increase your exposure to their networks.

3. Ask for Feedback

In the same spirit, get your audience talking about stuff you already have or do to give you insight on what you're doing right, and what you need to improve.

You can get valuable information and at the same time engage your audience and deliver a ton of positive public relations.

4. Use Your Captive Audience

Family, friends, and employees are more than people you know. These are people that are most probably active on social networks, so why not use them to help you promote your business?

The great thing about having your employees advocating your business to their networks is that they know the insides and outs, so their endorsements count for a lot more than that of any outsider.

You can also rope in your business partners and associates to the cause, and do the same thing for them. It is a symbiotic relationship that can pay serious dividends.

5. Choose the Timing

Saturating social media with posts whenever you feel like it is like using a shotgun to kill a cockroach. You will probably hit your target, but again, you may not, and it is messy.

To make sure you reach your target audience, you need to get your timing right.

Find out when your audience is likely to be on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, and schedule your posts to make sure you are on top of the timeline. Any earlier or later and you risk missing them altogether.

You can also use features on your favorite social networks that give you statistics on when that happens, like Facebook Insights.

6. Choose the Platform

That said, getting the timing right is useless if you're not even on the same platform.

While you don't have to be a wizard to get on the equivalent of Platform 9 ¾ for your social media marketing, you do need to do some research to find out where (as opposed to when) your target audience is likely to hang out.

For example, Facebook tends to be a catch all for all audience wanting to connect with family and friends from the past, but LinkedIn attracts older and college-educated audiences engaged in business. If you are a B2B company, you may want to concentrate more on LinkedIn than Facebook.

7. Join Communities

You can leverage the many groups and communities on different social networks to laser target your audience.

You can join industry-specific groups in LinkedIn and Google+, even Facebook and Pinterest. Some of these groups have as many as a million members, so it can really improve your exposure.

The communities you choose really depends on what you have to offer the group. You just need to be careful that you don't sound too pushy when you promote your business.

Establish yourself as a part of the community before doing any promotions or making announcements.

8. Co-Promote

Not everyone is in tune with the right way to create content for social media, so it is always a good idea to find a way to get ideas on how to figure out what works and improve social media promotion.

Some platforms and software can help you curate suggestions on what to post on your networks, and what sites you can post it on according to popularity.

9. Test Your Headlines

Headlines are among the most important elements in your social media post, because about 6 out of 10 people will choose what they click based on the headline.

With the numbers already running against you in getting attention, you need every bit of help you can get.

Unfortunately, there is no one formula for crafting the perfect headline. Sure, you can use power words and emotional words as suggested on CoSchedule's Headline Analyzer, but the proof of the pudding is really in the eating.

If you have a decent following on Twitter, it is the most effective way of testing your headlines. Choose two or three of your best efforts for a post, and publish it on Twitter one after the other at least an hour apart.

Check back and see which one gets the most engagement, and has the most potential, and choose that one for your other social networks.

10. Use Social Logins

The main reason for social media marketing is to get people from your social networks to your website, but the converse using social logins is also effective marketing.

Most people are tired of filling up site registration forms (from whence you can capture their email), but are willing to use their social logins to save them the extra step of creating a new profile.

If you offer social logins on your website, you get access to their emails as well as social profiles, where you can also find out their interests and other information. It just makes more sense for everyone concerned, so why not?

Effective social media marketing is not rocket science or wizardry. You just need to be willing to  think outside the box to get the results you want. You can use these 10 unusual ways to use social media to promote your business.