Why Everyone Is All About Instagram

Recently purchased by Facebook for $1 billion, Instagram has blown the fuck up. And it's only going to get bigger.

Popular for its easy-to-use filters that make any amateur photographer's shot look hip/nostalgic/whatever, Instagram capitalizes on a simpler and more mobile model of Pinterest. Incredibly app friendly, it might just provide the boost in mobile-legitimacy Facebook is so desperately lacking.

Replacing their heavily criticized Facebook Camera, Instagram not only brings a better set of photo filters but a huge following of trend setters that have been swapping shots of their cappuccinos across the world for over a year.

Now paired with the company's $100 billion and rising net worth, there's no doubt we can expect a bigger following, more photoshopping tools and more Instagram use in social media marketing.

A great example of how businesses can use Instagram in social media strategy is Spyhouse Coffee in Minneapolis. Staging a competition through Instagram, they've set up a panel of judges (assumably baristas) to choose a winner each week from submitted shots of their stores. Each week there's a different theme; submitters simply follow these three guidelines.

1) Submitters must follow @Spyhousecoffee.
2) Each submitter can only submit one image each week per theme.
3) Entries must be public and submitters must be local.

Simple content paired with open-submission design. It's brilliant. And it's practically free. Welcome Instagrammers, to the future (now available in more than just sepia tone).

The Rise of Mobile

According to Forrester Research, between 2008 and 2011 the number of adults that accessed the Internet from PCs daily rose from 54 percent to 62 percent. During that same amount of time the percentage of daily mobile Internet users rose from 4 to 26 percent. There is no denying mobile is the way of the future.

But what does it mean? And how does that affect marketing?

Right now, formatting websites and apps to fit mobile devices has become the lucrative business for all tech savvy personnel. With writing code becoming more and more obsolete with the rise of easy-to-build websites with software and websites like WordPress, Weebly or whatever, smart designers and back-end developers are led to enter a more fertile frontier.

On top of that, social media sites are going to change. Many pundits are declaring the move to mobile as the death of Facebook. Why? Facebook cannot offer the same advertising, branding or games that it can on its PC version. They are struggling to evolve where new social media can innovate anew.

And social media isn't even the big picture. ALL ad driven websites face future limitations on mobile. If current predictions are true, and the general public begins to use mobile as their main source of Internet access (the same way people replaced their home phones with cellphones in the '00s), restrictive data plans will begin to displace online advertising. And with restrictions on the majority of online users, where will advertisers turn? Television? Podcast? A new, better ad friendly form of social media? Only time will tell.

But not to worry, not all is daunting. With the rise of mobile comes a complete rise of client information. If mobile networks fully capitalize on information gathering and sell it to businesses/marketers, they could make the once unprecedented niche marketing of Facebook look like a block phone at a Steve Job's iPhone Fair. The potential for geomarketing would be enormous and through studying potential customer's behavior patterns, mobile could turn out to be best thing to ever happen to marketing.

Why Ad People Are Not Normal [INFOGRAPHIC]

Hilarious infographic from Co.Create on the different social media perspectives between an ad person and a "normal" person.