When Twitter introduced Vine,
the six second video format, last year, it was met with a rather muted
reaction. After the inevitable flurry of sign ups and people starting to
use it, interest seemed to drop off. Other than some mildly engaging stop motion videos
there seemed little real utility for it as a medium and indeed, as many
pointed out, short-form video had existed in conjunction with Twitter
for years with services like Twitvid.
Interestingly though in the last couple of months it's seen a gradual
emergence as people have got to grips with it. It's been used to great
comic effect with 'Ryan Gosling won't eat his cereal', but more significantly from a marketing perspective the DIY brand Lowe has found a quite brilliant use
for it to publish 6 second home maintenance master classes and suddenly
Vine seems to be popping up all over Twitter as part of different
brands' Twitter content strategies.
Then last Thursday the short-form video sharing space hotted up. Instagram, the Facebook owned photo sharing network, launched a short-form format.
Users can record up to 15 seconds, 9 seconds more than Vine, it has 13
custom filters, and users have the ability to select their own thumbnail
as well. Instagram usage figures are huge, with 16 billion photos
posted and with 1 billion likes a day, so it wasn't surprising that
hours after the Instagram launch Twitter started to send emails to its user base promoting Vine. The launch is undoubtedly a direct attack on Vine
and Instagram's much broader range of usage and customisation could
prove, yet again, that first mover advantage is not all it’s cracked up
to be.