Business is all about connecting well with the people you serve. While nothing can truly replace those face-to-face chats, Facebook can help keep you top of mind with clients and prospects.

Since you need a personal account before setting up a business page, it emphasizes the Facebook way: it’s all about individuals. Here are some tips to promote your company and connect with some of the 1.2 billion people who use Facebook every day.

The Anatomy of a Good Business Page

• Profile Photo
  Your company logo works well here. It’s recognizable and it’s the thumbnail image that is displayed with all your updates.
• Cover Photo
  This is one of the first things people will see on your business page, so make sure it hooks them in. Feature an engaging image that sends a message, and make sure it’s optimized for the right dimensions. We can help you polish your business page profile and design a snazzy cover photo. If we’ve already done design work for you, we can even repurpose it for Facebook, like we did for this managed IT services company:
  
• Call to Action
  Take advantage of Facebook’s call-to-action button. Choose an option that will drive people to do something important for your business. For example, with one click, people can easily contact you, sign up for something, or even make a donation.
• Posts
  To be effective on Facebook, you need to engage with your network on a regular basis. This is how you keep the marketing conversation going. Think of posts as tidbits that highlight your company’s services and results. Show what you do through photos and videos. And did you know you can pin your posts to feature the most successful ones? We’ll work with you to create compelling images that pique interest. Leave it up to us to schedule posts so you don’t have to worry about it. Here’s an example of what we’ve created for a power wash company:
  
• Ads
  Investing a bit of marketing budget into Facebook ads will increase your reach. You can pay to boost a post or create an ad that targets an audience by criteria, including:
  • • Location such as country, state, city, and zip code.
    • Demographics such as age, gender, language, education, work, ethnic affinity, and more.
    • Interests based on their hobbies and pages they like on Facebook.
    • Behaviors such as what they purchase or where they travel.

  
  Are you curious about paid ads on Facebook but aren’t sure how to go about doing it? We can help you figure out the best strategy for your budget.

If you are looking to get more business using social media, especially if you market directly to consumers, ask us to help you connect your business using Facebook.

If you’re on LinkedIn, you’ve probably noticed their new look. In January 2017 LinkedIn released a desktop redesign, the largest overhaul since their inception. They wanted to make it easier for you to access relevant conversations, content, and opportunities, whether from a mobile app or desktop.

It’s a great time to revisit your LinkedIn profile. Like it or not, LinkedIn has become like your digital business card. And who wants to give out a sloppy business card—to 450 million people?

What Not to Do

Here are some common mistakes we see in LinkedIn profiles:

• Unprofessional profile photo

  Save the selfies for your personal life. When it comes to business, make sure you have a professional image of yourself. It can get you up to 9x more connection requests.
• No background image

  Don’t settle for the standard nondescript blue background. If you want to stand out from the crowd, then visually showcase your business in the header.
• Default headline

  This is like your personal tagline. Have something more creative than just your job title and company name.
• Uninteresting summary

  A professional bio is your chance to shine. Tell your story in a way that sticks.

Take It Further

Once you have a profile set up, are you leveraging the power of LinkedIn? Here are some other actions to consider that will promote your company.

• Keep connecting with more people to expand your network.
• Create a company page. This will highlight your business more than your profile can.
• Post content that shows your expertise in the field. This will engage people on a deeper level. 94% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn to distribute content.

We Can Help

We’ll help you create a digital business card you’ll be proud of.

• Are you confused by all of LinkedIn’s different sections? 

  We’ll help you figure out what information goes where.
• Do you want to improve your profile, but don’t have the time to do it?
  Let our creative team craft it for you.
• Do you need a professional photo?

  Come on over to our studio, or we’ll come to you for a photo shoot.
• Do you want to create a company page or content to post?

  Consult with us, and we’ll strategize together.

Partner with us to develop a LinkedIn presence that will set you apart. Show the world that you want their business.

David Shulman is a professional musician turned physical therapist. And his training in both worlds led him to a revelation: “Practice, practice, practice” may not—as the old saying goes—be the sure-fire route to Carnegie Hall.

Pain without Gain

In fact, 70 percent of professional musicians will be forced to stop playing—sometimes permanently—due to injury caused by repetitive overuse. For years, Shulman worked one-on-one with musicians, treating their injuries and showing them how to avoid future injuries without sacrificing proficiency. As the demand for his specialized knowledge grew, Shulman created an interactive workshop that combined treatment with education. Participants raved: “You need to get this workshop to more people. You are the music profession’s best-kept secret.”

At a Loss for Words

But Shulman was a physical therapist, not a marketer. He didn’t have time to talk up his workshop. And he wasn’t sure how else to get the word out.

Hands-on marketing for the Injury Prevention workshop

Singing Their Song

We created a flyer to do the talking for him. In an age of electronic communication, a printed flyer was a refreshingly personal way to reach the music world’s gatekeepers at symphonies, music schools, jazz ensembles, and beyond.

The flyer features a photo-illustration of a violinist’s hand with pain points highlighted as in a clinical diagram. Classical music meets high-tech medicine. The message stresses the workshop’s uniqueness—prevention, hands-on demonstrations, and participants’ enthusiasm.

Creating in Tune

When clients, designers, and writers function as an ensemble, they make beautiful music together, with a message that’s in tune with the intended audience.

Legend has it that Hemingway once livened up lunch at the famous Algonquin Round Table by claiming he could write a story in just six words. Not a jingle, not a headline, not a summary, but a story with a beginning, middle, and end. He challenged the other writers at the table to ante up ten dollars each and, if he was wrong, he would match their wagers. The words he quickly penned on a napkin were “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Presumably, Hemingway made some money that day.

The Hemingway story may be literary legend, but the six-word story stuck. In 2006, the online magazine Smith resurrected Hemingway’s challenge and asked its readers for six-word memoirs. The challenge soon exploded into books, websites, competitions, and six-second videos. This month NPR invited listeners to submit their thoughts on race and cultural identity as six-word stories. And also this month, the Accent Interactive team took on its own six-word story challenge.

Play with a Purpose

Our first team Creativity Date took us to the flamboyant American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore.

We were on our first Creativity Date (our version of an Artist Date but for teams). Our destination: Baltimore’s American Visionary Art Museum, which was featuring an exhibit on storytelling.

Enroute to the museum, we’d identified four essential elements of a story:

1. Life gets knocked out of whack.
2. A protagonist tries to set things straight.
3. An antagonist tries to obstruct him.
4. Things get resolved (completely or incompletely, favorably or unfavorably).

Now we were on a treasure hunt of sorts, looking for those elements in the visual stories before us.

Tucked in a corner of the exhibit was a sign about six-word stories and a painting one woman created from her story. The challenge was irresistible: Could we possibly capture all four elements of a story in six words? We paired off, found a quiet cranny, and studied two photographs on our iPads. We had five minutes to come up with the six-word story unfolding in each of the photos before us. Click each image to see what happened.

Down to Business

Our six-word story challenge was a blast, but it wasn’t only that. It was a smart business move.

Jay Conger, the Henry R. Kravis Research Chair in Leadership Studies at Claremont McKenna College and consultant on business leadership, is an advocate of storytelling as a business tool:

“Stories have enormous power in terms of recall. If you look at statistics, or at PowerPoint, or at documents, what you discover from all the research is that there is almost no recall. What will be remembered are a few compelling stories that you share with your organization and with your team. And those will guide them when they are far away from you—which, by the way, is much of the day.”

So how might you bring freshness to your typical business functions through six-word stories?

1. Departmental reports

Imagine your department managers giving their reports in the form of six-word stories. OK, so you may want to augment those stories with P&L statements and pie charts. But a month later, the story is what will still be sticky.

2. Employee Orientation

How could you tell the story of your company in six words? Even more intriguing, what six-word story would your employees tell about your company?

3. Debriefs

What do you remember from that three-hour debriefing about last year’s product launch? What would the impact be on your team if you distilled the lessons learned into six-word stories?

No Way!

If you asked your team members to come up with six-word stories, what kind of responses might you get? Expect resistance, maybe even panic! But also expect surprisingly entertaining and effective results.

Expect, too, to be surprised by who tells the most compelling stories. Our man-of-few-words, tech wizard Tait, was crowned King of the Six-Word Story by the end of our Creativity Date. His steel-trap mind could look at a photo and capture its essence before the writerly types among us had settled on the name of the protagonist. Enjoy discovering the storytellers on your team.

Worth the Effort

It’s pretty easy to write six-word slogans or six-word goals. But stories are another matter. Incorporating the elements of story—life out of whack, protagonist, antagonist, resolution—forces you to explore meaning in what’s occurring in your business. Your gut tells you that even though the protagonist got life back in balance this time, it’s gonna get knocked out of whack again soon. And then what? What will motivate you to fight another day? Pie charts? Or stories about how you weathered that mess back in 2009?

Walking the Talk

A week after our Creative Date, our team members wrote their own six-word stories about the day. Here’s a sampling. How did we do? Can you find the essential elements of a story in them?

• Kitschy store. Dynamic duos. Eloquent storytelling.
• Art, food, fun fueled storytelling. Next?
• Art invited Storytelling. A first date.
• First date jitters—creative duos victorious.
• Paired storymakers conquer spangled storyville—super!