Fandango smashed industry expectations, its own projection, and probably more than a few champagne glasses as the company proclaimed 2012 to be its best all around year of all time. And that’s not just saying Fandango made a lot of money this year.

Fandango sold over 400 million tickets in 2012, and its app was downloaded over 300 million times. Everything from ticket sales to traffic to app download results were off the charts, and those numbers aren’t vacuum numbers either. Fandango expanded in the face of competition and movie theatres who realized that they, too, could sell tickets online without having to give a cut of their revenues to a third party.

What does this mean to you? It should serve to underline one fact. Convenience is priceless. Fandango’s tickets are more expensive, and its service is becoming generic as it is copied by more and more people. But no service is more convenient to do business with than Fandango. They have the smoothest app, the smoothest running contracts with the closest movie theatres to you, and have successfully billed themselves as the FedEx of major metropolitan movie outlets. When you absolutely positively have to make an exact showing, accept no substitutes. Fandango will get you in.

It’s a lesson that applies to social media as well. Facebook became the biggest media hub because it was simply more convenient, and more user friendly, than MySpace. And Facebook posting and media marketing campaigns succeed because they have innovated new forms of convenience — new, tangier posts, easier-to-digest and sharable memes, and a strategy capable of tying all of your online properties into one marketing strategy with one goal. That’s why social media experts exist at all, of course.