Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Social Media Thoughts: Video, Vine and Instagram

I have a love hate relationship with video. I love sharing and watching videos I have shot, edited and uploaded. But of all content creation, it takes the most time and work.

I also enjoy watching good videos. Cute animal videos like these puppies in pj's or sleepy bunnies. Funny videos like guilty dog or engineers and cats. Or amazing videos like octupus camouflage . But it has to be a really intriguing video to make me give up time to watch it. I get aggrivated when there is informaion I need, like how to fix something, and it seems "buried" in a video. Often times I just want to see a picture because I can look at it and be on my way with minimal time commitment. Video? I have to find my headhphones and plug them in! And if that video goes beyond 3 minutes... well. that is just too long.

When Vine came out in January, 2013 I sort of shrugged it off. Well, I signed up to get my username, but didn't use it. Video was so much work. And I didn't have time to watch it. Then one day, I think we were at a charity walk, and Tina shot one. It seemed pretty easy and quick so I did one. It WAS easy and quick. I was hooked. I was Vine-ing videos everyday. The pugs were the perfect subjects. I started using it for work too.

Then in June, Instagram rolled out video capability. I stopped using Vine. Intagram had a few nice different features, like being able to bring in video you already shot and adding filters. Here is a pretty good breakdown of those features. But that wasn't why I switched. Number one, I had more followers on Instagram. Number two... I didn't want to maintain a second app for video.

I felt badly for Vine. They came up with an easy to use, fun, successful app and someone came along and copped it. Luckily, Vine hasn't died off since Instagram started video, in fact they say they have gained 27 million users since then.

I haven't opened Vine in months. But I'm also not posting a lot of videos on Instagram. Did Vine force me to THINK video? What do you use?

3 comments:

  1. From a personal standpoint, I use both because why not. I don't have that large a follower base on IG or Vine, and when the mood for video strikes (it's not as often as I used to), I pick the app of the moment. I will say that I experience more crashes and failed uploads with Vine. From a professional perspective, we have a growing follower base on our IG account, so the natural tendency is to go where the people are, as opposed to spending time, energy and media dollars to amass a new following on another platform. The interesting thing about Vine is the integration with Twitter. If you want your rich media to view seamlessly in Twitter, then you may want to consider Vine. Speaking for the accounts I manage, we do see much better engagement rates on our tweets when we have rich media included in the tweet (too bad it still adds characters- they need to fix that!) Instagram still poses a barrier for viewing content in your feed due to the lack of integration, and having to click the link. That really bugs me as a user!!

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    Replies
    1. Such good points! And Instagram plays well with Facebook now that they own Instagram. It's like Twitter vs. Facebook.

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  2. I am more likely to use Vine, but I seldom upload video. I don't care for video on IG because random bursts of sound startle my dog. Wish you could choose whether to see them.

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