Happy New Year! With 2013 officially in the rearview, let's take a look at what's ahead. Without further ado, here's my list of of the top five trends digital marketers should prioritize in 2014.
So, you joined the Pinterest party a while back, because you could't stand to miss out on the social network everyone and their sorority sister has been raving about since March 2010. But watching its steady growth and wanting to leverage the social media platform that’s driving more referral traffic than LinkedIn, Google+ and YouTube COMBINED, you decided to get your business in on the action too!
You’ve set up your business account, verified your website, grabbed the Pin-It button and added the follow me button to your website. You’re super-duper excited about enhancing and expanding your brand awareness. You’re eager to increase meaningful interactions and engagement with your target audience. You can’t wait to boost your SEO, your sales and your revenue. There’s just one minor detail… you’re not sure what you should be pinning. Joy to the rescue!  Facebook is known for testing out new features on a small subset of users before rolling them out to the general public. The world’s largest social network has been collecting our ratings of businesses and locations for some time now, via Nearby on mobile and desktop pages, among other methods. But yesterday morning Techcrunch received a “reliable tip” that Facebook is currently considering assigning new visibility to their five-star rating system by prominently placing it at the top of Pages’ timelines, directly below the company or place Page Name, and in News Feed previews.
 That's right, folks! The Facebook Like and Share buttons, which are viewed over 22 billion times daily across more than 7.5 million websites have both received an official makeover. The first ever, at that. So get excited, Longhorns! You never again have to feel awkward about clicking on a "Gig'em"-esque button when publically showing your support for or affinity to content, companies, etc. (Hook'em, horns!).
 Most people living, breathing and possessing any reasonable amount of cognitive functioning in today's world would agree that, like it or not, social media has become intrinsically fused into our daily lives. When the majority of people's media consumption occurs on social media, it's no surprise that consumers are attracted to and more likely to trust social brands.
But which brands are most effective with their social voice? How do we measure the power and influence of social media? Shouldn't marketers be able to verify it with empirical data rather than theory or pure logic? Shouldn't the hard facts give brands the information they need to be able to provide consumers with the content they crave? 
Oh boy, I remember the moment I came across the NextGen article titled Why Every Social Media Manager Should Be Under 25 for the first time (this morning). I saw the headline in one of my Hootsuite streams and immediately thought to myself, "Well, that's an asinine proclamation; I'm certainly not going to waste my time reading something with such a ridiculous title. I’m sure it's probably just someone’s lame linkbait, anyway."
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JOY
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