Businesses looking to improve their digital marketing reach have a bewildering number of new concepts to bend their heads around. A relatively new area, for instance, is the world of video micro-blogging.
Essentially, micro-blogging involves very short commentaries on your activity; whether personal, for family and friends, or a more commercial application for business marketing. Video micro-blogging is much the same, but with moving images. For commercial use, the benefits are obvious, as these videos can function, essentially, as ad space.
Two social media platforms that have enabled micro-blogging are Twitter and Instagram.
Realising that social media users wanted to share video clips as well as still images and text, Twitter launched Vine in January 2013. The Vine app has become the moving image version of Twitter, allowing around 20 million users to share six-second videos; this month, Vine reached nearly three million video shares in one day.
However, Twitter doesn’t have it all its own way. Like Apple and Microsoft, Coke and Pepsi, Manchesters Utd and City, there is another social media behemoth looming large over the digital landscape: Facebook.
These two social media giants are bitter rivals, and fiercely protective of their business and its data. So where Twitter goes, Facebook will surely follow. And indeed, this month Instagram (owned by Facebook) also allowed its 130 million users to share videos, in this case 15-second, rather than 6-second videos. The day after Instagram made their move, video shares on Vine dropped by 50%. And worse, perhaps, more people shared Instagram videos on Twitter than via its own Vine system.
Twitter likes to describe itself as the “global town square” however, in terms of getting the message out, it’s evident there is a new player on the scene. What we are witnessing in the digital sphere is effectively a proxy war between Facebook and Twitter, using their Vine and Instagram subsidiaries to fight it out for social sharing dominance. Is Vine seriously threatened? Or are we witnessing nothing more than social media savvy users checking out Instagram’s new feature, before making their decision on which platform to use?
Let’s just hope those users are a little more savvy than Dick Costolo, Chief Executive Officer of Twitter. During a birthday party at Twitter headquarters, he was caught discussing their rival, Instagram. His comments were recorded surreptitiously and then released to the blogosphere as a… wait for it… Vine video. Hoisted upon his own petard.
The Artlab specialise in developing effective social media strategies for businesses. Please contact us on 0161 875 2528 to speak to our team.