Instagram Video BlackFin360 - Innovation To Reality

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.

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On June 20th Instagram announced the addition of videos to its popular photo-sharing app. Besides being an obvious response to the growing popularity of Twitter’s Vine app, this is another confirmation that short form content creation is on the rise.

I was recently asked by DM Confidential to share some tips for marketers to create visually compelling content and test another content distribution channel. Article highlights are at the bottom of this post.

What are some best practices or tips for how marketers and brands should use videos on Instagram?

A couple come to mind right away: Brands can share unique branded experiences, highlight brand advocates, co-create content with audiences, preview products, highlight a specific cause, extend the brands persona via video, preview upcoming events by adding visual context, share important news, drive promotional awareness, leverage Instagram video for promotion, and create videos that show fan appreciation. The key is to create content that is a natural extension of the brand.

How is it different from Vine, from a marketing perspective?

The first key difference is simply tied to reach potential. By embedding Instagram video within the existing application for both iOS and Android simultaneously, Facebook is providing access to a large and very active user base.

From a marketing perspective, the greater length of the video — 15 seconds vs. 6 — the ability to stabilize the shot, 13 filters and the ability to tap to focus allows for greater flexibility and complexity of a shot. This can provide greater depth in terms of the type of content that can be created and better represent the brand.

Examples of Instagram Video Filters

My assumption is also that at some point Instagram Video will support the ability to create custom filters, similar to how brand applications can incorporate custom Instagram filters to further create associations with the brand.

Do you like this addition to Instagram?

I do like the addition of video to Instagram. Facebook is still the ideal storytelling and amplification platform. With so much attention given to Vine, this was the natural next step for Instagram. This combined with Facebook’s ability to support hashtags as well as photos in comments are all signs that the platform’s future is tied to visual content both static and active.

Example of Facebook Hashtag Support

What does it say about the importance of visual content, and short-form videos specifically?

Compelling and relevant visual content has been a key element of driving engagement. An overwhelming majority of content shared is still tied to images. With that said, Vine and Instagram Video now offer quick and easy solutions for consumers to create short-form content. As brands become even more comfortable with their guidelines tied to user generated content, short-form videos will be another viable alternative to support their existing content strategies.

Here is the full DM Confidential Article

Follow Tom Edwards @blackfin360