The revitalized look of Facebook's News Feed (Image courtesy of Flickr user Thomas Hawk)

In March, Facebook announced its new mobile-inspired news feed which has again sparked conversations surrounding the vital importance of visual elements in social media marketing. “Visual Marketing” was coined as a breakout trend of 2012 with the growing popularity of social media sites like Pinterest and Instagram. With pictures being shared and liked more than text, links and videos it’s clear that more images equals more engagement. This is not surprising considering the brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text alone, 83% of all learning is visual, and 93% of communication is non-verbal.

Image courtesy of Dell's Official Flickr Account

Identifying ailing digital marketing strategies can be challenging. Even if you are posting content on a regular basis and gaining followers, are you meeting goals and generating a return on investment? In order to answer these questions, you have to evaluate your social media strategy.

The Golden Circle creator, Simon Sinek. (Image courtesy of Flickr user Cea.)

Rarely will a company prioritize “gaining prospect and customer trust” as a top goal for its marketing campaign. However, trust is one of the most crucial aspects of any relationship: romantic, platonic, familial or professional. If little or no trust exists in a professional relationship, projects will likely not meet goals and will waste time, effort and money. On the other hand, a trusting professional relationship enables both parties to communicate openly so that work is accomplished efficiently and effectively. At 90octane we believe trust is a differentiator. In fact, it’s our why.

Image courtesy of SEOPal

The search engine marketing community has been abuzz over the last week analyzing signs that a potentially game-changing update to Google’s algorithm is about to take place. No one knows exactly when the new version of Penguin will be implemented, or how it will affect SEM efforts, but Google has made it clear that this isn’t just another minor change – it’s the next step for Google in search engine marketing.

How are you presenting yourself? (Image courtesy of Slideshare)

Social media users love images. The popularity of Instagram and Pinterest along with Facebook’s redesign forecast an image-saturated future for social media. This should come as no surprise since research shows that between 60-65% of people are visual learners, meaning this portion of the population prefers visual stimuli over text.