Instagram is the picture and video sharing service that Facebook so wisely acquired just a few years ago. In 2012 the Instagram community grew to 80 million users, with the number of users growing substantially each year. As of January 2014 the service now has over 150 million active users. With over 55 million photos posted daily, Instagram is considered one of the most dominating social media services and has one of the most popular websites in the world.

It’s a New Year and we all know what that means, it’s time for us to make another New Year’s resolution. One that we will all keep this year…Right? As you have probably guessed the top resolutions have to do with getting in shape, eating better, or just losing weight in general. It always comes back to being more healthy overall.

In 2013 it seemed like everyone was on social media. Kids that were as young as 13 and grandparents that were 85. Social media was used to spread viral videos, update everyone on breaking news, complain about life, keep in touch with distant friends and family members and some people enjoyed gloating to everyone on their friends list. If there was a way to use social media, it was being done in 2013. With this many people on social media, it became the go to platform for companies to raise brand awareness and advertise their services.

With video playing such an important role on the Internet in 2013, is your company leveraging video as a form of advertising? Billboard has started using video views to account for the top 100 singles. That means that song in a viral video could start to climb the charts. We all remember "What Does the Fox Say" or "The Harlem Shake" each received millions of views, got themselves onto the billboard charts and earned tons of money through video advertising. Of course the companies doing the video advertising were definitely the real winners. 

A 23-year-old entrepreneur did. Evan Spiegel, the co-founder and chief executive of Snapchat, rejected a $3 billion cash buyout offer from Facebook. Snapchat is a photo messaging application with which users can add text and drawings to photos and videos and send them to a list of recipients. The sent photographs and videos are known as “Snaps.” Users set a time limit for how long recipients can view their Snaps (ranging from 1 to 10 seconds), after which they are deleted from Snapchat’s servers.

Sometimes as a small business owner you might not realize how important it is to have a website that is visible by millions of people. It’s almost 2014 and some small business owners still don’t even have a website. Today, it’s not enough to simply have a website, you absolutely must be found as well. Pretty pictures and sliders won’t do this for you anymore. Now you are responsible for optimizing your site, writing blogs, link building, building citations, and getting on every social network known to man. This is a lot of hard work. This hard work is known as SEO or Search Engine Optimization.

Google is at it again, doing things that most of us don't understand and probably won't understand for years to come. The most recent thing Google has done is to build a barge. Not a virtual barge, a real barge, docked in San Francisco Bay, we call it the Google barge. A second one has been towed into Portland Harbor, Maine and reportedly, two more are under construction.

Twitter’s IPO price was set at $26 per share, valuing the company at $18.34 billion. Trading began on November 7th with the price rising to a high of $50, then closing at $44.90. At the end of the first day of trading, Twitter was valued at $25 billion! Keep in mind, this is a company that has never turned a profit and posted a loss of nearly $65 million for its most recent quarter.

Many companies use videos to promote their brand, products and services. Some are taking it to the extreme, using pretty amazing cameras like the GoPro to demonstrate a product from the user’s point of view. These unique and sometimes extreme videos go viral and spread not only brand awareness but they also send huge SEO or search engine optimization value back to your website by linking back to your site.