How-Tu Tuesday: Short Video Content on Instagram and Vine

As visual content trends on social media, video continues to play a vital role in spreading creative and informative content. Short video content, especially, has grown in popularity since smartphone applications, like Instagram and Vine, have made it feasible to quickly shoot, edit and share short videos with the audience in real time. These are some of the advantages of using video on social media:

1. It’s easy: there is no need to hire a film production company anymore when you can now use the phone in your pocket to create great footage.
2. More entertaining: an informative video is more likely to attract attention and engagement than an informative piece of text
3. Mobile friendly: users are mostly checking their social media accounts on mobile. According to Social Media Week, 90% of Twitter video views happen on a mobile device. ‎
4. Search Engine Optimisation: As social media content dramatically improves your SEO, video content also contributes to your listing on the search engine results page (SERP).

So what is the difference between sharing video content on Instagram vs. Vine?

Instagram is a free photo and video sharing app available on Apple iOS, Android and Windows Phone. Owned by Facebook, users can upload photos or videos to their profile and share them with their followers or with a select group of friends. Vine, on the other hand, is a six-second only video app that is owned by Twitter and allows users to create quick, easy and looping films which can then be shared across Facebook and Twitter.

Video Marketing:

If you are looking for a more modern medium of marketing and your target audience is younger and more adventures, both apps are a great way to create fun and visual content to promote your business. You can market your products, record how-to tutorial videos, fun entertaining videos or even educational videos that will benefit your niche.

Instagram allows users to shoot multiple disjointed clips and string them together. The length of the video allows for more story-telling. Once a clip is shot, Instagram allows for the last clip to be deleted. There are also 13 filters that can be used to edit the complete video, this allows for more interesting visuals for the target market. For the iPhone 4S and iPhone 5, Instagram has a Cinema feature that allows to stabilise video shot.

The advantage of Vine’s 6-second clips is that they are looping, which allows for more creative content that is more likely to be viewed more than once before the viewer moves on to the next clip. Vine users can also shoot multiple disjointed clips and string them together which has made the app become popular for quirky stop-motion videos, like these.

Discovery and Sharing:

It doesn’t matter how great your video is if your audience can’t discover it. Both Vine and Instagram allow users to use and search for hashtags. One of the best ways to spread the reach of your video is by linking it to Facebook or Twitter which works well in both apps.

Sharing Instagram videos works best on Facebook as the video thumbnail shows in comparison to sharing them on Twitter where only a link is visible. With Vine, sharing on both Twitter and Facebook works great.

 

By 2017, 69% of all internet traffic is going to be video content. So whether it’s Instagram or Vine you prefer to use, video needs to be integrated into your content strategy.