The Hidden Value Of Vine

Guest Post: Tom Kelk is a tech/sport blogger and Senior Social Exec at communications agency, Pitch. You can find him on Twitter (@TomKelk), LinkedIn and his blog

Was I the only one who looked through the Loops of my own account to be pleasantly surprised by the number of Loops I’d received on my personal channel? I’ve only put out 15 Vines, but these have been watched over 230,000 times.

This intrigued me on two counts, if I’ve amassed over 230,000 Loops, what have brands generated? And secondly, what do these Loops show? Is Vine actually providing more value to brands than we’ve thought?

First off, Vine is part of the digital strategy of many brands, but it’s not central to it. It’s a subsidiary. That’s not going to change, but looking at how brands are racking up thousands of Loops within a short space of time, Vine might just be a more central aspect of brand strategies. The numbers are particularly impressive.

Brands like Ford EU and Charmin have racked up over 20m Loops between them. Both of their YouTube channels combined total 34m views. So the results on Vine are not too shabby given the dramatic disparity between the cost of generating YouTube video compared to six seconds of Vine! If we break this down, Charmin attracted 8m Loops from 67 Vines, an average of 119,000 per Vine.

On YouTube, they’ve seen 159,000 views per video. It’s not far off. It’s even more apparent with Ford EU, who generated 12m views of 47 videos, averaging 255,000 Loops per Vine. Compare this to YouTube, where Ford EU has managed 29,673 views per video. Consider this greater deal of production cost, you’d have to argue that Vine is providing quite the value for Ford EU.

Then there are those putting more effort into Vine, including post-production uploading, like Nike Football. They’ve amassed over 19m Loops on their own through 14 Vines – that’s an average of over 1.35m Loops per Vine! Let’s say, for argument sake, that an individual watches a Vine three times (probably closer to two but go with it), that means around 5.5m people have potentially viewed Nike’s content on Vine.

With Nike so reliant on time with their ambassadors for content, the opportunity to create a series of Vines in their time with an asset, as opposed to one or two glossy YouTube edits, is an attractive option. Worth the investment? I think so.

Following on from these total numbers, there’s the added bonus of the watching of a Vine several times repeated. It begs the question, when watched three times, is the penetration of simple, condensed messaging, greater than a three-minute long YouTube video?

There are obviously pieces of content that need to be hosted on either channel through necessity, and it’s clearly not as black and white as the numbers suggest, but it could be worth a study, right?

Please excuse the crude analytics, but they simply illustrate the potential in Vine if executed correctly. Many brands will have Vine as a part of their digital strategy, but perhaps it’s time for a little bit more of that YouTube budget to be reallocated into creating Vines.

Back in April last year, I wrote about how brands should be taking Vine more seriously, and whilst it is evolving, it’s been painfully slow with brands. Maybe, with quantifiable metrics, we might just see that investment.

 

loops

 

 

About author

Tom Kelk
Tom Kelk 25 posts

Tom Kelk is a tech/sport blogger and Account Manager at communications agency, Pitch. You can find him on Twitter (@TomKelk), LinkedIn and his blog (tomkelk.blogspot.com)

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