Ahead of the MTV Video Music Awards on August 25th, MTV will reveal the nominees for the event via Instagram as well as Vine. The network hired Koha Phan, a popular stop-motion animator, to create eight pieces of VMAs-related content. The VMAs are the first award show to ever announce nominations via these video platforms, and will be distributed via the #RoadToTheVMAs campaign. The first video comes out at 8 a.m. EST on Wednesday, with one video released per hour thereafter. MTV was the first brand to reach 1 million followers on Instagram in November 2012, and now boasts 1.37 million Instagram followers and 117,000 Vine followers, so the videos are sure to be shared widely. Whichever video format proves more popular and sharable, of course, will have instant bragging rights.
Tag: vine
Honda Responds To Tweets With Vines
In perhaps one of the most innovative uses of Vine to date, Honda is responding – with Vine videos – to users who tweet with #wantnewcar, in real time. The videos are filmed on premises, at the same time the tweet comes in, customized to the twitter handle of the user that sent the tweet out. Though other companies like Urban Outfitters have turned to Vine for campaigns, this is a new step forward in real-time, creative advertising with the medium.
Instagram Launches Video Embedding For All Websites
Instagram announced that its new video services is now embeddable on websites. Instagram’s protocols are similar to YouTube’s, as you can click share below the video that gives you an HTML code that you can copy and paste into your website. The embedded photo or video appears with your Instagram username, and clicking on that username takes the user to the Instagram webpage. The update should help the spread of Instagram’s video app, that is keeping pace with Twitter’s Vine.
Instagram Video: Is It Better For Brands?
The answer, at least at first, seems to be yes. Although Vine is currently more popular than Instagram for media sharing on Twitter, Instagram is quickly making up for lost time. Over 5 million videos were uploaded onto the social network within 24 hours of its release, in addition to the one billion Likes logged per day, and its total user base of over 130 million. What’s more, 67% of brands are already familiar with the platform for marketing purposes, and the extra 9 seconds of video is crucial for advertisers looking to make a pitch. The fact that Instagram is already used widely by social media marketers means that it’s easier for their brands to jump into the video game very quickly. And according to Mashable, videos shared on Instagram have twice as much engagement as photos – and significantly higher engagement than videos on Vine. Ultimately, this means that it’s easier for brands to transition to video production on an app they’re already familiar with, and by breaking down the time limit and adding professional editing features, Instagram video provides a much friendlier, broader marketing platform – with all of Facebook’s users to boot.
Instagram Video And Facebook Hashtags Borrow Twitter’s Model
Yesterday saw the big announcement that Facebook has been hinting at for weeks: video for Instagram, in the form of short 15-second clips. The basic intention of playing catchup to Vine is obvious, but in combination with Facebook’s support for hashtags, the shift in direction indicates an even larger shift towards branding and marketers. Hashtags are a convenient way to organize real-time conversation and create an anchor for people to connect to trending topics – and that’s precisely what marketers want, to be a part of these big discussions. Facebook’s prior ad model, in essence, makes the consumer a pitch-man for a product that they might or might not genuinely enjoy. But the new video and hashtag functions, in combination with the elimination of promoted stories, signals an about face. And it’s no accident that Instagram videos are 15 seconds long, the same exact length as the average TV commercial. Facebook and Twitter are now facing off in a veritable battle for real-time broadcast advertising.
Instagram To Launch Videos June 20
Beginning June 20, Instagram will be launching video service, allowing users create and share 5-10 second videos. The announcement comes on the heels of recent news that Vine has surpassed Instagram for Twitter sharing. While Vine has taken off, Facebook’s Instagram does have the advantage of their existing 100 million user base who will not have to install a new app to begin creating videos. Twitter and Facebook have not played nice with integration of their subsidiaries so do not expect inline views of these videos on Twitter.
Vine Surpasses Instagram For Media Sharing On Twitter
Just five days after launching for Android, Vine is now more popular in its total daily shares on Twitter than Instagram. Likely a result of opening Vine up to the Android market, links to vine.co were shared over 2.5 million times, with instagram.com links at just below 2.2 million. This also likely has to do with Instagram’s web profile launch, which cut off the easy expansion of shared photos within Twitter streams. Instagram remains ahead of Vine on Google’s list of top free Android apps, however, and it is difficult to know just how many active users and daily creations there are within the app network.
Vine Comes To Android
Twitter announced today that its long-awaited Vine app for Android is now available. Though many features from the iOS version of the app are missing, such as front-facing camera support, search, mentions, and hashtags, Android users have a new feature available exclusively for them: Zoom. With 13 million current active users, many of them active brands like Rolling Stone and Wheat Thins, who have leveraged Vine’s brand-to-fan experience, the Android release has availed the video-creation service to a whole new genre of smartphone users. Expect Vine to boost its numbers rapidly, and for brands to continue to collaborate with short-film makers to take advantage of the unique medium.
Lowe’s Uses Vine For Spring Campaign
Many marketers have experimented with Vine thus far, but none have fully embraced the six second video medium for a full fledged campaign. This spring, though, Lowe’s is doing just that. The home improvement retailer has put out dozens of Vines featuring home improvement tips; some of the most popular include how to remove a stripped screw, how to get rust off knives, and how to use pillow cases to organize sheets. Vine, for Lowe’s, simply provided the perfect medium to make them sharable, and simultaneously show off their products at work. It has created a very wide body of work very quickly for very little money, and thus far the results have been very promising for the company. It remains to be seen if this strategy will be broadly applicable to other brands, but for a social medium that is only three months old, having a full fledged media campaign isn’t a bad start at all.
Comedy Central’s Social Media Comedy Festival
As television and social media become ever more intertwined, new uses of Twitter and Facebook for broadcast are frequently pioneered, but rarely as a primary distribution platform. Next week, Comedy Central will be hosting a five day comedy festival entirely on Twitter and Vine, completely removing its traditional broadcast element from the equation, and effectively testing an entirely new format for mainstream media distribution sanctioned by a company as large as Comedy Central’s owner, Viacom. Only one event for the festival (a panel discussion between Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, and Judd Apatow) will take place before a live audience, and it will be broadcast via Twitter exclusively. Events like Comedy Central’s social media comedy festival could be a valid solution to the question: how do we engage mass audiences in real time in an on-demand world?
