Since January of this year, there’s
a new app available on Android that’s been taking the market by storm. The
Twitter Vine video sharing app works in a similar way to the popular social
network but in a different medium. Whereas Twitter limits you to 140 characters
of text, Vine instead gives you the ability to create a video of up to six
seconds in length and share them with other Vine users, as well as users of
both Twitter and Facebook. Users can then share videos, look up trending
content and find friends.
The rise of video content on the internet has caused a shift
in internet marketing, with advertisers branching out into creating videos
catered to an internet audience. However, research has revealed that people’s
patience with internet videos are on the wane, and customers no longer have the
patience to even read a video’s title before clicking away. What does this mean
from a marketing perspective? Is Vine the next step in revolutionising video
marketing, or even the thing we needed to keep video marketing alive?
At the moment, it’s difficult to say what impact Vine will
have, if any. For one thing, there’s a similar app to Vine that’s been
available on the internet for longer but has gotten less people talking despite
working in much the same way. Tout describes itself as ‘a real-time information
network’ where users can post and share videos of up to 15 seconds on whatever
subject they like; you can even engage in conversation with other users.
Generally it’s made less of an impact on the public consciousness here in the
UK than it has in America, where it was founded, because it seems like not many
people have actually heard of Tout, and the ones that have seem a little
perplexed by it. They wrinkle their brows ask and ask, not unreasonably, ‘what’s
the point?’ Other view it as simply being a fad that will die out as quickly as
it started.
The question is whether this indifference will have the same
effect on Vine. The fact that videos can only be six seconds or less means that
marketers have little to work with, which is both a blessing and a curse. It’s
a curse for obvious reasons; marketers are left to figure out how to make six
seconds of content memorable content, but the blessing comes from the fact that
the content itself will be entirely relevant when produced. Social networking
is a simple and effective way to get your video circulating too. The short
nature of the videos should prevent someone with the shortest attention span
from getting distracted, but if more and more people are actively avoiding
marketing videos, does that really mean anything? It’s becoming increasingly
clear that the medium of video is incredibly limited and this is where the
problem arises. Instead of catering to the impatience of consumers, marketers
should instead be looking for ways to reinvent and revolutionise the content
that they’re producing. The success of
vine is currently in a suspended state; only time will tell if it’s set to
become as core to our internet experience as Facebook or Twitter.
