Tips On Using Vine For Your Business

Vine is an excellent and clever video marketing platform that enables your business to generate greater brand awareness and exposure online. So with this in mind, today I want to take a look at Vine’s increase in popularity and also look at how it can benefit your business, whether you’re using it as part of your content strategy or, alternatively, just you’re looking to experiment with it as a one-off.

First of all, what is Vine? Well, it was released in January 2013, and it’s currently owned by Twitter. It has an audience of around 67 million users.

So it’s a massive audience that you can tap into, and it’s essentially a recording app, which you can download on mobile and smartphone and tablet devices, which enables you to film up to six seconds of video footage. Then once these videos are created, they’ll basically repeat on a loop once you share them.

You can share them on Vine through their community, or alternatively you can share them on Twitter and Facebook, obviously Twitter because of the fact that they own the platform itself. So that’s a little bit about what it actually is.

How does it work? Well, essentially, you download the app, again, on a tablet or smartphone device. Once you’ve downloaded it, there’s a camera record button in the top right-hand corner, and you can press on that and it will record. Take your finger off of that, and it will stop recording.

That enables you to basically have something in the frame that you’re filming. You can stop recording, move stuff around, and then record again.
There’s a great way to have lots of effects going on, on the inside of the shots that you’re creating. It’s easy to use. That’s the great thing about
Vine.

You also have a green bar at the top of the screen, which basically shows you how long you’ve got left of your recording. The main thing to remember with Vine is, obviously, you’ve only got six seconds of filming, so you have to make those six seconds count.

Now that we’ve looked at a little bit about how it works and, obviously, Vine’s rise, I just want to talk about some examples that I’ve seen beforehand. One of the first companies I remember really utilising Vine and grabbing it by the horns is an American DIY company called Lowe’s. They basically used Vine to create six second videos to solve people’s DIY frustrations. People would have problems, and Lowe’s found a very unique way of showcasing tips and tricks, how to solve those problems and those frustrations through video, visual-based content on Vine. Off the back of this, they gained widespread media attention because, like I say, they were one of the first companies to actually show the potential of what you can do with Vine, and from then, companies have jumped on the back of it.

Other examples include ASOS, whereby they showed in their video an unboxing of their products, and a model was wearing the clothes, so it enabled people to take a look and see what those clothes look like before they make a purchase. That’s another clever idea. Oreo cookies, as well, have done some fantastic creations on Vine. I thoroughly recommend going onto the search engines and just taking a look at some of the things that they’ve done, which include tips for how to eat the cookies and other art pieces as well. Well worth checking out if you get the time.
So that’s a little bit about the examples of companies that use Vine. What about the benefits for your business then? I’ve got five on the board here
that I’d like to go through.

First of all, Vine enables you to advertise and promote your products, obviously through visual-based content. This could be new product lines,
existing product lines. You can also do things a little bit outside the box, like promote sales, offers, discounts, that kind of thing. If you can
have banners and be a bit more quirky in the things that you’re filming, then there’s loads of areas that you can tap into. Get creative with it.

See what you can do, and just think about how you want to portray your brand’s voice and your identity across all those videos that you’re going
to be filming.

Second of all, Vine allows you to have more content to share on social media. If you are using it as part of a content strategy, you’re going to
be using things like blog posts, infographics, press releases. Vine enables you to incorporate visual-based content within those plans as well. It
gives your audience something else to look at. It’s going to attract a different audience as well, because of the nature of how we share things on
social media these days. It’s great to tie in a wide variety of content. So that will work in your favour.

Thirdly on the list, Vine is incredibly easy to use. Once you download it, it’s not going to take you long to get used to the features, five, ten
minutes max just to play around with it. Once you’ve got to grips with it, you’re basically ready to film and get cracking.

Fourth on the list, it’s free, which is obviously always a benefit. Just like the point above, you’re not going to be investing much time into
getting to grips with how to use the app. You’re also not going to be investing any money to get started on it. That may well change in the future. Vine might start charging. At the moment, at present, it’s free. So I’d suggest downloading it, using it now, trying it out, and then you’ve obviously got it for the future when you want to start using it a bit more frequently.

Finally, number five on the list, Vine enables you to reach a large audience. As we mentioned earlier, 67 million users currently. That figure
has obviously taken off massively since January 2013, so around about a year and a half at the time of doing this video. That figure is obviously
expected to rise, as well, given the fact that more businesses and users are downloading it. There’s a massive market for you to tap into. So if
you’re not on Vine, you’re missing a trick.

I hope that’s proved to be useful for you. Get creative. Have a look online at some of the examples. Sit down in a team at your company. Work out what it is that you want to do and how you want to portray your brand’s voice or messages across your videos, and good luck with creating your own Vine videos.

Source: koozai.com