The niche social network Pinterest is gaining popularity, and seems to be catching on quickly. If you are unaware, Pinterest.com is a virtual pin board, where you collect and admire images found all over the web. It’s like a bulletin board, only you are pinning up web images, on an online board. You can pin whatever images you want, and you can sort and organize your pin boards based on your interests.

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For internet marketers and businesses alike, 2012 promises to be a movin’, shakin’ year for all organic, social and mobile trends! Despite the tough economic climate in 2011, the rabid run toward strategic mobile marketing as a primary retail sales tool continues unabated with updated analytics, tools and apps.

The growth curve and development of retail-focused mobile marketing is huge, particularly in generating  that retail sale in near-real time!  Push marketing and hyper-local ads with a social media support structure, along with emerging apps like Google Wallet make it easier than ever to search, shop and spend on the go. The benefit to consumers? Competition and price comparisons work in their favor in a big way, not to mention ease and convenience.  The benefit to retailers? Buying everything from a new phone to a gift card to a slice of pizza becomes simpler and more intuitive via your phone, providing opportunities to capture both impulse buyers and smart-search consumers.

It seems that social media has now entered the “public trading” stage, with:

• Google Plus giving Facebook a real run for the money this time around
• Social image sites like Pinterest capturing a big chunk of our online enthusiasm
• Linked In becoming the “Who’s Who” of professionals and companies, garnering information on people and corporate profiles that boggles the mind

Oh yeah…and who would have though that cool QR code would be considered old-fashioned or quaint quite so soon?

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Are you on Twitter? (We are, follow us @mannixmarketing) If you’re not, I suggest you try it out. Many of you are probably rolling your eyes and asking yourself, “Why learn another social network?” or, “What can Twitter do that Facebook can’t?” In a nutshell, Twitter can easily connect you to industry experts, world news, and even your favorite celebrities, where Facebook connects you with people you know. There are some exceptions to this with the new subscribe feature on Facebook, but Twitter is still winning the game in this respect.  You don’t have to have a mutual relationship on Twitter, you just pick who you want updates from, and you can tweet to anybody.

Consumers use Twitter for many different reasons. Some tweet to their favorite celebrities, asking questions that may be answered by the celebrity, or anyone else that views the tweet (most tweets are public). Some tweet to their favorite sports radio show, hoping to get mentioned on the air, or get a retweet. Some don’t tweet at all, and just follow their favorite accounts looking for breaking news stories, or updates on Kim Kardashian’s latest marriage. Corporations use Twitter to announce new products and/or updates for old products. Marketers tweet about upcoming events, or promote new products and services to their followers. There are many ways to utilize Twitter, and everybody does it differently.

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We all pay for services of one kind or another.  We pay to have our trash picked up so we don’t have to haul it to the landfill ourselves. We may pay to have our yard mowed or our snow shoveled. We pay to have our hard drives cleaned up, our hair cut, and our tax returns completed.  All of these are services that are considered time savers as a result of our own cost-benefit analysis.

Link building and quality content are both critical parts of any successful SEO program.

Strong link building takes time and effort; getting high quality sites to point their golden fingers at you (aka links) is part of the hard work that an internet marketing professional knows how to do effectively.  The same with content – exceptional content is the coin of the realm in search.
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Facebook has been going through changes since day one, and every time an upgrade is released the walls and news feeds of the most popular social network in the world become saturated with complaints. I am constantly begging people to stop complaining and embrace the changes that Facebook continues to make. I mean, lets be real, if Facebook never made any changes, many of you wouldn’t be allowed to access the site, and it would still look like this:

This is what Facebook looked like in early 2004, when it was an exclusive social network for Harvard students.

Yuck! I have to give props to the Zuckerberg for coming up with the idea (well, implementing it) but the original design and function of the site are far different from what over 750 million users see today. Imagine if Facebook responded every time a user complained about how difficult it is to get used to the new format, or the new news feed. This is what we would be stuck with, and I would have logged out a long time ago.

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