The blogosphere has been buzzing with talk of Facebook's $1 billion acquisition of Instagram all week. What powerful marketing and branding lessons should entrepreneurs be taking away from this?

First, it should inspire all entrepreneurs and small business owners with the fact that you can still win huge in America with a little innovation. Word is Instagram's CEO is landing a sweet $400 million out of the deal. What will your billion dollar business idea be?

The second lesson is perhaps just how valuable photos are becoming. In 2007 Flickr was acquired by Yahoo for just $35 million. Pinterest is next on the list.

Video was supposed to be one of the hottest marketing trends of 2012 but it is clear that photo sharing is right up there with it. This is great news for entrepreneurs who haven't been able to get their own videos off the ground yet, whether due to budget or mechanical restraints.

Like vanity numbers, photos are incredibly powerful branding tools. People love them, original pics can do a lot for making your blog and social profiles stand out and the search engines certainly love them too.

People acquire products and services from people they know, like and trust. Photos are a great personal branding tool for breaking down these barriers and making more personal connections with prospects over the Internet.

However, this doesn't mean that it is a great idea for entrepreneurs to post pictures of everything they eat and all of their weekend partying antics. As with other branding tools your pictures should be unified with your other branding, bringing together the verbal branding on your blog and social networks and driving more callers to your toll free numbers where you can make live contact and close the deal.

So take time out to brainstorm new ideas regularly, use original photos, share them and use your vanity numbers to turn this traffic into conversions.