Building on the popularity of their Vine App acquisition, Twitter have developed new Video features into their App for iPhones and Androids and should lure fickle users back to the social media platform.
Our obsession with living in the moment and sharing our every move should ensure this tool’s instant success. We’ve seen it with selfies (17 million selfies posted online every week) and with Vine, which had almost 350 thousand million ‘watches’ last year from April to December. That’s right, 350,000,000,000.
The more we depend on (let’s be honest, can’t live without) our mobile technology, the more instant applications like this become desirable and successful.
Absolutely instant
Vine, offering just 6 seconds of looped footage, has been lapped up by users since its inception in 2012. No doubt its huge popularity spurred Twitter on to produce its App for a longer instant video of 30 seconds.
Twitter Video makes it possible for you to literally share ‘every move’ with just one tap. With instant editing and uploading to Twitter, your video can be seen by the world in almost less time than it took to shoot. Conveniently, the app also allows iPhone users to upload video from their phone’s camera roll. Twitter assures us that this feature will soon be available to Android users, so hang in there.
Just for fun or of commercial value?
Whilst the appeal of these instant tools is obvious for personal use, big brands have been quick to use Vine to their advantage by creating ads for digital platforms. Either in short sharp 6 second bursts (Ford) or a compilation of 6 second Vines (Hewlett Packard).
We think the Video App will appeal to more businesses by giving them a slightly longer platform in which to promote themselves.
Playing catch-up?
Twitter is keen to grow our loyalty, but it has stiff competition from other social media favourites Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook. Facebook claim that videos have been viewed 3.6 times more in the last year by Facebook users and the posting of videos was up by 94% in the US and 50% around the world.
Clearly the Video feauture will appeal to both personal and savvy commercial users due to its instant qualities. It will make promotion via a short video in the style a TV commercial more accessible for businesses, ultimately making it the ideal tool for bite-size chunks of promotion.
Twitter hopes this App will create more Twitter users and engagement, not to mention more commercial investment on their platform. We definitely think it could work, Twitter.