Graphics – The New Web Marketing Tool

With the $1 Billion acquisition of Instagram by Facebook and the rapid rise of Pinterest, pictures and colorful images and graphics are becoming the most powerful web marketing tool to spread information on the web.
Instagram, started in October 2010 as Burbn, a sharing platform, grew quickly as one of online marketing’s new trends when it moved to focus on easy photo sharing. The service was initially available as an application through Apple devices and recently an Android app. The simplicity of sharing photos and 30 million members made the acquisition of this web marketing tool very attractive to Facebook.
 
Pinterest is the next internet darling and one of the hottest new trends in online marketing. Growing from 627 visitors to over 18 million in two years, Pinterest is likely on the short list for acquisition by Facebook, Google or Apple.

Pinterest users ‘pin’ images to virtual pinboards. The service grew in popularity among recipe collectors, who pinned recipes to their boards the way we used to pin them to a corkboard in our kitchens. Now we are using Pinterest as a web marketing tool to track business images, motivational messages, hobbies and just about any digital image you can imagine.

One of the best ways to learn a new skill is to jump right in. The first blog we created at Ten Golden Rules was for ourselves, for our first Google advertising campaign, podcast and YouTube video we followed the same path. And for our first Pinterest idea we created an ‘infographic’ of my 3 E’s of Social Media. This will be an interesting experiment to see if this graphic can spread through pinning and social media Likes and ReTweets.
 
Another area where graphics are spreading the love is on Facebook. My friend JB Glossinger Facebook.com/MorningCoach22 has used motivational and emotion based graphics to get people ‘talking’ about his Facebook Fan page via likes, comments and shares. Each graphic gets several hundred of these virtual conversations which spread virally through users’ Facebook pages.

So, how can you take advantage of these new trends and web marketing tools to create interest about your brand through graphics? What interesting facts can you turn into an infographic? Do you have a favorite motto or motivational saying you can share on Facebook to create some buzz? Did you download your Instagram App yet?
Please share your favorite graphics and success stories with us!