Photo credit: Franco di filippo via Wikimedia
Once a social media favorite, Vine is wilting. News outlets and pundits – all with their own puns — say leading influencers are swinging away from Vine to Facebook, Instagram or YouTube.
When the platform launched in 2013, its shareable, four-second looping videos quickly ripened into an influencer marketing dream. Companies eagerly partnered with influencers to create branded videos, or Vines.
More than half (52%) of the platform’s top users (those with 15,000 followers or more) have left the platform as of Jan. 1, according to influencer marketing company Markerly. Out of the 9,725 users on Vine with more than 15,000 followers, 5,094 have not posted on the platform this year.
Tough Competition from other Networks
Competition is a main reason. Other platforms allow longer, higher-quality videos. Snapchat allows 10-second videos in addition to photos, custom filters, and brand channels. YouTube offers the ability to produce polished, long-form videos.
Zach King, considered Vine’s most famous “face,” hasn’t posted on Vine since late January and is moving his content to YouTube, Markerly notes. Although he has fewer YouTube followers, they are more engaged and committed than Vine followers.
Meanwhile, brands face difficulty conveying their message within Vine’s limited timeframe of four seconds. Vine also lacks advertising options, such as a version of Twitter’s “promoted tweet” or Snapchat’s sponsored geofilters. Companies must partner with individual creators to produce branded videos. Platforms like Facebook and Instagram also offer more helpful analytics about audience demographics.
The shriveling of Vine highlights how social networks can burst on the scene and then die off. Advertisers and marketers can be hesitant to build a full campaign on new networks because it’s unclear if the network will last long enough for a brand to establish roots. “Staying the course with tried and true networks like Instagram, Pinterest, blogs, and YouTube offers brands the best opportunity to capitalize on an engaged audience and turn around ROI,” Markley states.
Is Vine Still Fruitful?
Alexa Tonner, head of partnerships at the digital influencer ad firm, said marketers who were once enamored with Vine now question if it is fruitful. “There are people with millions of followers who haven’t posted in a month or six months,” Tonner told the Wall Street Journal. “So brands are not in a hurry to repeat Vine programs.”
Esa Fung grew his Vine following to 1.8 million and has created vines for HP, Target and Disney. Yet he has pruned back his Vine posts and is looking to grow his audience on Facebook and YouTube.
“Facebook and YouTube have much larger scale than Vine, so you can reach more people and make the most money there,” Fung told Digiday. “It’s more complicated to produce videos for Facebook and YouTube though, because your content needs to be much longer than six seconds.”
Bottom Line: Withering prospects for Vine, once a preferred social media app, demonstrates the fickle nature of social media marketing. What’s touted as the future of marketing can quickly become today’s rubbish. Brands that latch onto the hottest new phenomenon may lack adequate time to attain maximum marketing impact. Vine’s story highlights the value of owned media and more traditional marketing channels. Using a multichannel approach to diversify your PR and marketing prevents being blind-sided by a major change in your preferred social network.
William J. Comcowich founded and served as CEO of CyberAlert LLC, the predecessor of Glean.info. He is currently serving as Interim CEO and member of the Board of Directors. Glean.info provides customized media monitoring, media measurement and analytics solutions across all types of traditional and social media.
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