Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

If you missed the social media news last week, Twitter launchedVine; a standalone IOS app allowing users to share 6-second video clips in an Instagram-esque way.  The Vine iPhone app has rocketed up to the 14th most downloaded free app; so many brands have begun to take notice.  With all the buzz, I decided to take a look at Vine’s engagement numbers over the weekend to see how many public tweets contained a Vine link, if use increased since launch and to determine what the major conversation themes were.

In order to pull all of the public tweets I searched for the term “vine.co” using the Cision Social Media Dashboard. This pulled all the tweets that contained the unique URL associated with a Vine video.  While this won’t give us every Vine video that was produced (not all content is shared publicly or on Twitter), it can be a nice indicator on how often and what content was shared.

As of this morning over 100,000 tweets were sent containing a Vine URL since the January 23rd  launch, when Twitter’s Dick Costello sent out a tweet of steak tartar.  As you can see from the graphic below the total amount of tweets containing a Vine link increased fairly drastically throughout the weekend with the coverage spiking on Saturday, Jan. 26 at noon, with over 11,000 tweets sent!...

Whenever a new platform launches these days, brands are instantly checking them out to see how they can “become a part of the conversation.” What that really means is how they can use a site like Twitter, or its new app Vine, to get your eyeballs, interact with you and, of course, sell you more stuff. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s commerce at its purest.

The story isn’t that brands try out new platforms. That’s boring. The interesting part is how they approach them and why. Now that consumers have the power to skip through commercials on programs that they record, creative advertisers have to start pushing the envelope on generating interesting and persuasive messages outside of the television set.

I spoke with VaynerMedia founder Gary Vaynerchuk, and his firm urges their clients to test new things out. When he says test it out, he means it:

"I tell our companies that there’s a 72 hour rule where you’re not even thinking about an ROI or how you can generate business. They should just try things out"....