Twitter’s Vine is a marketer’s late Christmas gift

Twitter has just launched Vine, a way for users to capture short 6 second bursts of video and share it with the World and their followers. But it’s also a chance for marketing departments and agencies to finally embrace something revolutionary and completely become a creative context machine again.

Vine integrates with Twitter in the same way as Instagram, meaning that Vine videos can be embedded directly in tweets, showing up in followers’ streams. Vine videos can also show up in a separate Vine web page. Users can also follow others separately throughout the app, as well as comment and like.

Something new

There are already plenty of apps out there but Vine works differently (and uniquely) in that it lets you shoot multiple short cuts to make one single, 6s video. The process is easy and involves no editing.

Because of the 6s time barrier marketers will be forced to become more innovative in the way they create their content. For Twitter it’s the video version of a 140-character limit and will prove powerful in its simplicity. Pinterest and Instagram have their charm but we’re about to see static images becoming passé. Video content in short bursts will drive the marketing machine back to the imagination drawing board and separate the signal from the noise.

Succinct storytelling

Whether Vine will create viral sensations like those on YouTube remains to be seen but the opportunity is there for marketers to make it their own and create brand personality through storytelling. The context opportunity alone is enough to drive people back to Twitter and reengage with brands who previously just pushed out dead content links through Hootsuite.

Vine is nothing new, there are alternatives out there but as a native app it may just become Twitter’s ‘creeping’ marketing success story.

For more on Twitter Vine, check it out in the Apple App Store.