Back in March I drafted a blog post around Vine and how it could be used by marketers to get into peoples lives with creative 6 second video clips.
4 months is a long time in Social Media. Keek has suddenly announced itself in the short video sharing stage claiming 50 million users. Then just last month, Instagram launched video sharing capabilities too.
Background
Vine was launched in January to a ripple of interest. In March when I started investigating Vine i noticed that TechCrunch had some intriguing data on the early adoption of the service. They suggested that Vine was establishing itself as the de facto tool for short video creation and sharing. Current stats suggest that there are about 1 million links shared on the platform.
Whilst Vine offers 6 seconds to strut your stuff, Instagram introduced the 15 second video sharing option in June. The tools differ in their capabilities, for example, to edit and where Vine is deeply integrated into Twitter, Instagram has the obvious connection to Facebook. Early adoption was impressive: more than 5 million clips posted within the first 24 hours.
There are other video sharing tools out there, such as Keek (which offers video sharing of up to 36 seconds) but obviously Vine and Instagram get most of the attention because of their connection with the main Social platforms.
Potential
In terms of marketing, microvideos could be used for:
- A quick pitch
- Product demo
- Product launches
- Promotions or competitions
- Answering customer questions
Current Usage
A recent study by readwrite highlighted the effect that Instagram was having on Vine. The figures in themselves are not so startling. There are over 130 million active users monthly on Instagram. A new feature is bound to spark extra interest. You can see the report here but it would be really interesting to see the current figures since there was a massive update to Vine earlier this month.
Examples
The major difference between Vine and Instagram is the video clip length. I am sure many brands were rubbing their hands in delight realising that this video length would be the same as a television commercial slot. How well will it be utilised?
Hootsuite’s blog recently posted about 5 brands using Instagram video – to be honest I am not really impressed by any of them. But it’s still early days and I appear to be in the minority given that, at the time of writing, the Starbucks clip had received 53,000 likes already.
From a personal perspective there are success stories out there already. Even though Vine was only a few months old, the audience was enough for Dawn Siff to land herself a job through a Vine video – thought to be the first resume in this format. Congrats to her.
Always On
Of course, we shouldn’t forget about always on channels such as YouTube and Vimeo for sharing video content. The advantage of these platforms is that the content is always there and easy to find and share.
A video says more than 140 characters
Twitter is obviously limited with it’s 140 character restriction. You can get a lot more out of a picture and Pinterest has captured the imagination in that sense.
Potentially you can get even more from a video. Is the 15 second market going to be swamped with brand advertising and kill the end users enthusiasm?
What about you, are you utilising any of the micro video platforms to promote your brand? Got anything worth sharing now? Feel free to post links in the comments below.