Vine is dead, it was announced yesterday. What now? Do you have a strategy? What can you learn from this and how does it impact Vintuitive’s Six Second Tech?
Twitter’s short-form video platform Vine will close down in a couple of months and after that time your well-crafted masterpieces will no longer be accessible, not for viewing or for download. Vine has assured us that we’ll be given enough warning so that we can download our Vines before it shuts down the service. Still, that’s quite a blow to those of us who’ve stuck with Vine of the past three years or so.
Vine was more than just some fun thing that people got really arty with in their spare time. In no time at all Vine was producing celebrities that would make money on speaking tours, just like YouTube.
And businesses were on to it too, with some quite successfully. Lowes Home Improvement store, for example, produced short tips with very skillful stop-gap animation commercials.
Earning money using Vine for promotion
Like many others, I made good money from Vine. An Australian app developer approached Vintuitive to promote a new mobile app RWND, which coincidentally, was also a short form video app, this one with an even shorter duration than Vine’s 6 seconds. It was clear that Vine would be the perfect place to promote such an app, and so small 6-second commercials were created every week that promoted the last week’s highest viewed RWNDs to the Vine audience.
Vine for delivering short tutorials
Vintuitive also developed learning programs that utelised Vine.
Keyboard Kung Fu, a Taoist approach to memorising keyboard shortcuts
One of these was delivered with a Taoist flavour, one lesson each week in a series called Keyboard Kung Fu.
Six Second Tech, because your time is valuable
Until the news yesterday I was delivering another series of weekly lessons on optimising your use of social media and technology, called Six Second Tech.
How to prepare for Vine’s closure
With the news of Vine closing down soon, those of us who’ve created a lot of content on Vine would like to keep it and are wondering how they will do that. Should we download each Vine, one at a time? Or will Vine provide us with a bulk download tool? In their announcement on Medium, Vine said that they’d let us know soon how we can download our Vines.
Any time a service that you’ve put a lot of time and effort into goes away like this it reinforces some important points. As a business, your main marketing focus should be on promoting your website instead of another 3rd party platform. It’s also a reminder that whenever creating evergreen content, that is, content that you could potentially reuse, you need to ensure you have a solid content strategy in place.
A current Content Strategy is vital for all businesses
Any business using social media is regularly creating content, whether they realise it or not.
Having a current Content Strategy means that all your content is stored and organised while it’s being created. When a service like Vine goes away you can rest easy in the confidence that you already have all the content backed up and cataloged in a way that is easy to access and repurpose.
Use your website as the central hub of your business
While it is beneficial for businesses to be active on social media, it is important that your own website remains the focal point of your actions. Post your content to these social media sites but embed each post in your website and direct people to your platform whenever appropriate instead of promoting Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc. That way, when the platform closes down, as Vine has just announced it will do, you simply move the file to a different source and alter the embed code on the page of your website. By doing so, you are not having to redirect anything and all the traffic will continue to flow into your website.
In the case of Six Second Tech, for example, I had uploaded the weekly videos to both Vine and Instagram and embedded a blog post for each week’s tutorial. It is now an easy process for me to go back to the blog posts on Vintuitive and swap the Vine embed code with the Instagram embed code.
In fact, I have just done that while writing this post. It took just a few minutes.
Good bye Vine, we’ll miss you.
Would you like assistance with your social media?
Vintuitive provides training and assistance to anyone who’d like to learn the skills to become more productive with online tools and how to promote their business with social media. If you would like a hand with your Content Strategy, you can get in touch with Vintuitive via the Contact page.
