Six seconds of creativity and viral success on Vine can boost videographer careers, comedy stardom or a business brand. In early 2013, Twitter launched its Vine app for quick, looping videos that allows anyone with a smartphone to become a filmmaker reaching an audience via social media in something close to real time.
According to The New York Times, Vine had 13 million users crafting lightning-fast videos within four months. Now, major companies, including Toyota automobiles, are using Vine videos to promote new products and reinforce brand recognition.
Whether you are aiming for a career in web video production or are established in marketing but looking for new ways to promote clients, Vine is a fun way to grab viewer attention. Here are three creative ways to use this relatively new technology.
Demonstrate Design Creativity
If you are a designer, Vine videos can help you to demonstrate your creativity and tech skills as well as your understanding of storytelling on film. Some of the most compelling Vine videos use simple tools, such as pencils, paper flip tablets, construction paper and scissors.
Hubspot highlights the work of UK animation studio Animate & Create, which uses the old-fashioned cartooning technique of drawing a character in several positions on consecutive pages of a flip tablet. When the pages are flipped rapidly, the character appears to be moving.
Similarly, the Vuze blog shows how Vine maker Khoa Pan uses stop motion and construction paper to create a dinosaur that appears to bite off the designer's finger.
Promote a Brand's Logo
Hubspot notes that to refresh viewer familiarity with its logo, Toyota Spain also used paper cutouts to create a looping road trip of sorts. A cutout of a tiny Toyota wagon appears to drive off a computer tablet, into the tunnel of a man's hoodie sleeve, then out the other sleeve to land in the palm of his hand and transform into the Toyota logo.
The Canada Business Review suggests another way to make viewers see a business logo over and over. A business can hold a contest in which it invites customers and other followers to submit Vine videos in which they are wearing the company's logo.
Make Quick How-to Flicks
Vine how-to videos can make the typical 500-word, how-to article seem like a book. For example, Social Media Today presents an Oreo Vine post in which you learn how to grind the sandwich cookies in a peppermill to make sprinkles for a bowl of ice cream.
The key in making how-to films and in Vine videos, in general, is to keep the story line simple.
The Gaia Group marketing website notes that "two-thirds of the world's mobile data traffic will be video by 2017" and that mobile-made videos now command 25 percent of viewer time on YouTube -- a major marketing tool. So if you ignore Vine as a web video production and marketing tool, you may regret it. That's not how you want to see the cookie crumble.