How Top Brands Are Using Twitter’s New Vine App To Stand Out From The Social Video Crowd

Why The Smartest Advertisers Around The Globe Are Flocking To Use The New 6-Second Sharing Sensation.

Vine is the new kid on the social video app block. It’s new, easy to use and proving a powerful tool for top brands across the globe.

Owned by Twitter but still retaining its individual identity, Vine is a unique social video offering. In a nutshell, it allows mobile users to create and post six-second social video clips. These videos can then be shared on multiple social media platforms.

The beauty of Vine is its simplicity. Unlike Instagram and other third-party apps, there are no filters, frames and other variations for the creator to use. They simply shoot the video clip and share it.

This all sounds great fun, but what can brands do in six seconds that they can’t do with existing longer forms of video content? Well, judging by the sheer number of brands we have so far seen flock to this new platform, it would suggest quite a few have already identified its potential.

Mashable recently reported that more than 100,000 tweets containing the Vine.co shortlink were shared on the second weekend of February 2013. This number will only continue to escalate as more and more people sign up to the service.

So far we’ve seen top brands, including adidas, General Electrics, Gap and Armani, using Vine as part of their current marketing strategies.

But any brands looking to dive into this latest social video offering should walk before they run. In other words, have a strategy before you leap in with both feet.

Here’s 4 ways we’ve seen global brands using Vine social video effectively:

1. Take Your Customers Behind The Scenes

As every brand knows, customers like to feel valued. Making a customer or potential customer feel special can go a really long way.

Offering a behind-the-scenes look at future content can be a great way to do this. We’ve already seen this teaser approach to content marketing work really well at tent-pole events like the Super Bowl and Olympics. Brands released 15-second clips of their big game ads across the social web to help generate and elongate brand conversation. Vine is an awesome vehicle for such content. Many brands are adopting this technique, from fashion brands (for examples, see below) to Premier League Football Clubs.

Doritos even went as far as to Vine their packaging re-design launch.

2. Run Product Demos

Vine is already used by a large number of fashion brands. From Armani to ASOS, they are all there sporting the latest season’s swag online. The Vine format is a really great place for consumers to be able to see products in a more engaging environment.

We’ve seen handbag demos, spinning shoes and even full catwalk sessions, all powered by Vine. Where there is an audience, brands can quickly market products in an easily shareable format thanks to Twitter’s Vine app.

3. Run Competitions

As witnessed when Pinterest first launched, it didn’t take long for brands to start using the platform to run competitions. Vine is no different.

To promote its pet insurance deals, Confused.com ran a competition in the build-up to February 20’s ‘Love Your Pet Day’ urging its consumers to create videos of their pets, with £250 up for grabs for the ‘most creative’ clip. It was a massive success for the price comparison website, attracting a lot of attention from its target audience.

Top marketing experts are always trying to come up with new ways to drive engagement around their brands, Vine video is a very fast and engaging solution if the competition is well engineered and managed effectively.

4. Encourage Customer Interaction

We’ve seen similar content curation campaigns on web-based video clients like YouTube before. However, thanks to this powerful new app, it has never been simpler for brands to engage with their customers and help them feel valued by the brand.

Not only does asking consumers to submit their own content help them feel part of the brand campaign, it also gives brands a stream of content that they can use in the current or future campaigns. With this approach, everyone’s a winner!

A University in Wisconsin-Madison, along with a fancy bunch of social media supremos used the app to build an ‘action video tapestry’ by getting users to submit their footage from one of their sports events to a pre-etermined hashtag. This is a great way for brands to get users to share their brand story effectively.

As for the future, we’ll just have to see how the numbers pan out. It will be interesting to see how brands use Vine to amplify their brand and engage their audience going forward. We think there is a huge potential to incorporate Vine into current and future video marketing strategies for brands across all industry sectors.

We’ve also seen some interesting Vine-related apps pop up over the web. Here’s a couple of our favourites:

Don’t forget! You can follow Unruly on Vine. Head over to the app and search for us. We’ll be there with some social video insight straight out of the Unruly Social Video Lab, session snippets from City Unrulyveristy and a whole dollop of Unruly culture from the Unruly HQ team.