Since the advent of Facebook it seemed that no one else would be able to amass such a large following at such breakneck speed as Facebook accomplished. The world stood back awe at the pace in which it grew, and so did the internet’s big players who seemed untouchable for so long. As Facebook’s thunder plateaus it seemed that it would be a long time before another player in social media would be able to accomplish or duplicate their almost religious following. Even the biggest player of them all tried, Google+ which is a huge success in it’s own right but still falls short of internet “cult” status.
Well in mid 2011 and early this year two social media websites have unbelievably gathered new users, I would say at an even faster pace and in a shorter period of time than the king of the social media castle Facebook did. Instagram and Pinterest. The reason I say they did it faster is because of all the quick media hype, attention and fanfare that these two sites gathered as they ravenously snapped up social media users across the web.
Instagram, which is perhaps the most widely used photo engagement platform right now, blew Flickr out of the water by adding fun social image sharing with the all important engagement factor. It is also used mostly as a mobile app, which makes it available all the time, at the touch of your text happy fingers. The possibilities of the platform is endless and it doesn’t’ take a genius to see that with the constant increase in the ability and sharing speed of mobile technology, storing peoples thousands, tens of thousands of photos bring opportunity.
Soon all of the photos you see will be “Instagramified” and shared to the masses.
At the time of me writing this, Instagram users are at the 33 million mark. And if you don’t think that is a big deal Facebook just bought Instagram for ahem…. $1 billion!!!
It should be mentioned that this is Facebook’s first acquisition and Instagram is still a very new company, very new. Just think about it, when have you last heard a company that just came out of the gates gets purchased for a-billion-dollars! The thought is staggering. Kudos to Instagram! Boy I wish I came up with that idea first.
In the Instagram purchase Facebook also purchased 33 million users who will be the first evangelists for the Facebook-Instagram integration. Brilliant!
The next big player that I would say is even bigger and worth more is Pinterest. I remember when our principal designer first found this site and got hooked. At the time she couldn’t stop using it and still can’t. The site probably had a few thousand users and I couldn’t see what the big deal was. And that was not so long ago…practically yesterday when you put it into perspective in the lifetime of a company. Now she has a thousand followers and Pinterest users has grown in the millions.
Pinterest is now the number 3 social network on the planet. Unbelievable!
So what does this all mean to internet marketers, brands and business?
Well if Facebook is willing to pay 1 billion for Instagram and I’m sure someone like say…Google. Can you see them willing to pay the same if not double, triple? Who knows for Pinterest? It’s a clue that you should maybe pay attention to what is happening. Already businesses are trying to capitalize on the hoopla by creating Pinterest campaigns to see what works. Though this is very much still in it’s infancy be sure that Instagram and especially Pinterest will come up with handy tools and structure to assist businesses in marketing themselves on their platforms. To see a Pinterest campaign in action Kotex was one of the first and the result was 700 thousand impressions.
Will we be watching the evolution of these hot new and here to stay social media platforms to see what can be done to “create for interest in your business” for all our clients? Definitely! Should you pay attention too? Absolutely!
Bravo to Instagram & Pinterest!
There are many common views on the topic of SEO that are shared by business owners and operators. The problem I see with most is that they know that it is important and would love to be on the top of Google listings, but sadly most are afraid to commit and venture into unknown territory. As I have previously said in my article 
This is a great question that many don’t know and most have not thought about. Google does not have people that sit in front of computers all day reading websites and ranking them accordingly. I can tell you that even the mighty Google does not have enough employees to do that and imagine what the payroll for that would be! The fact is Google’s web crawlers or spiders are constantly reading every single page of every single website constantly, and this process runs in the background day after day after day.
Good SEO strategy for your website is adding a blog, which is a great SEO technique. When tackling content creation, always remember the blog, because Google’s crawlers love blogs. Never forget that! Blogs that are consistently updated with new content, means that you are part of the online community and a positive contributor to new content that is published throughout the web. If your blog is properly promoted and people are reading and commenting on posts, that is even better. Comments on your blog also counts as new content, adding to the perception that your blog/website is important.
