With the recent launch of Instagram Video the natural inclination was what would the response be from Twitter’s Vine service. What features would be added to further compel brands & users to leverage their platform? On July 5th we received our answer as Vine announced the following on their blog:
New Camera Tools: We’ve redesigned the camera and included new grid, focus, and ghost tools to make shooting great videos even easier.
Channels: We’re introducing 15 channels for you to submit posts to or browse from the Explore screen, including comedy, music and nature — each with their own theme and Popular feed. They’re a great way to highlight the awesome posts that are shared every day.
On The Rise: Discover new people who are starting to capture the attention and interest of the Vine community.
Revining: Share other people’s posts with your all of your followers in one tap.
Protected Posts: Most Vine posts are public, which means they can be viewed, discovered and shared by anyone on Vine. If you want more control over who can see your posts, you can now protect your posts, which means only the people you approve to follow you can see them. And of course, if you choose to share one of your protected posts to Twitter or Facebook, then it will also be viewable on the web.
All features are available on iOS and all features will be added to Android in the next week.
FEATURE IMPACT DISCUSSION
Each of these features were implemented to continue the direct competition with Instagram & to create points of differentiation between the two platforms. The interesting elements in my mind were the focus on discoverability & sharability.
Channels were a surprise and one of the smarter moves by Vine. By creating top level categories in addition to adding “popular now” and “on the rise” allows for users to quickly filter to content that may be of interest to them, thus potentially increasing connectivity between users & content creators that are of interest. This may be a future areas where branded content can be further amplified as well.
The most important update was tied to the creation of “Revining” by allowing quick sharing within the app to a users followers, it instantly increases the virality potential of Vine related content.
From a brand perspective, Protected Posts was a key addition by allowing more control over content, a brand can more easily experiment with Vine content but note that if you choose to share to Twitter or Facebook that content is also viewable on the web.
Follow Tom Edwards @BlackFin360
