5 Secret Vine Marketing Tips Revealed

Are you using Vine to promote your business? Would you like to learn 5 secret Vine marketing tips?

Unless you’ve been living underground for the past few years, you will have undoubtedly heard of the six second video platform that is Vine. As a promotional tool, the app plays on the rather short attention span that seems to define us in the digital age. But how can marketers harness such a pithy platform when most of the time they’ve got so much they want to say.

Here are 5 secret Vine marketing tips and some examples of companies using them to achieve great things…

1. Harness the Power of the Share

Leaving aside Vine marketing for a moment, let’s go back to the basics of social media marketing. It doesn’t take a marketing guru to tell you that all you need to do to become popular and talked about on social media is to make viral content.

Your content might be here today and gone tomorrow but in that short five minutes of fame, the attention and new fans you’ve gained can be huge. Bear in mind you are going to take up only six seconds of someone’s time. If they enjoy that six seconds, they won’t mind taking up six seconds of someone else’s time, so they might just hit ‘share’.

Take this classic Vine from Lowe’s. It demonstrates with effortless ease how to use an elastic band to unscrew a stripped screw. If you haven’t seen it, you just put the elastic band over the stripped hole and it unscrews quickly and easily when you use the screwdriver over the elastic band.

If you knew that little tip, you may now be remembering the video. If you didn’t know it, you’re probably off to tell your nearest and dearest how to do it. That’s because it’s a eureka moment, a problem solved, and you want to tell everyone about it so you hit ‘share’. Lowe’s has produced several of these so called life-hacks and they have proved incredibly popular.

By addressing everyday problems that anyone could encounter with simple visual solutions, the company is creating a buzz around its brand on social media. This is also outstanding PR. You share because you care and from this people ascertain that Lowe’s clearly cares. 

2. Own It

One of the problems with the ubiquitous life hack Vine, is that no matter how good and useful it comes across, it often lacks a sense of style and individuality, two things that are essential in brand marketing.

You are far more likely to remember that Van Damme’s Epic Splits YouTube sensation was a Volvo campaign than you are to remember a Lowes’s lifehack, simply because the former oozed style and cool and the latter simply solved a problem. In getting people to remember your Vine’s you also have to get them to remember your brand.

Samsung are one such company to address this problem by putting their own product centre stage in the Vine, as seen in their stylish basketball video, in which their phones and tablets are all featured as one continuous viewing window into the animated basketball player’s gravity-defying slam dunk. By connecting the screens up in this way, Samsung’s various screens become fundamental to the concept of the Vine.

According to Econsultancy.com, Samsung’s basketball dunk short was one of the most memorable Vines of 2013. It’s impossible to watch this feature without being reminded of Samsung’s glittering array of smartphones and tablets, and despite its simplicity and very obvious brand focus, it was widely shared.

3. Celebrate

It may be a little obvious, but it is worth making the most of significant dates such as Christmas, national or international celebrations and events such as the World Cup or the Olympics. That is because a significant number of people will be searching for it via search engines or social media. Seasonal or event focused marketing like this is known as tent pole marketing. So when they see a good Vine relating to it, of course they want to share it.

Tropicana’s simple but effective Vine put out around Valentine’s Day is a perfect example of how easy it can be to do this.You’ll notice that not only is it witty and amusing, leading to people wanting to share it, but it is also very memorable in terms of the brand. It is only a very short step from seeing an animated orange couple to thinking of Tropicana.

Another company harnessing the zeitgeist, this time of the Winter Olympics in Socchi, was Procter & Gamble detergent brand, Tide, who put out no fewer than ten themed brands during the games, with many of them using the good natured competitiveness of sportsmen and women to break down somewhat frostier political tensions between the Western nations and countries like Russia or China.

4. Innovate

The Dunkin Donuts Vine videos went bravely where no Vine has been before — on to actual television screens. This happened nine months after we all started using Vine, so Dunkin Donuts saw the need to do something a bit different to make their Vines stand out. The ads went out during the Monday Night Countdown, a football pregame show on ESPN. By replacing football players with iced and hot coffee cups Vine tapped perfectly into the mood of the hugely popular Superbowl.

A totally different approachwas taken by travel accommodation company Air BnB who tore up the Vine rule book to create a four and a half minute film made from Vines that have been stitched together. When you consider that many of these Vines were made by the company’s social media followers, you start to get an idea of what a powerful and innovative cross-platform marketing campaign this was.

5. Create

Whilst Vine marketing is all about being creative, one video is rarely enough time to get all your ideas across. You only have six seconds of people’s time, but if you can make them like you and your brand, they will watch your next Vine and that gives you twelve seconds (it’s not rocket science but it’s certainly not easy).

Oreo, winner of the 2014 Shorty Awards, have taken it upon themselves to create Vine after Vine starring their familiar Oreo cookie. Putting the famous and much-loved chocolate cookie at the heart of their Vines may have seemed like an obvious thing to do, but by keeping the central character constant, Oreo have managed to create a genuine fan base for their Vines.

By utilising some of the concepts we’ve discussed here, such as turning ‘life hacks’ into a kind of ‘food hacks’ and capitalising brilliantly on events and the holiday season (check out the Shining inspired Vine for Halloween), Oreo have earned themselves over 58k social shares (incredible for a brand on Vine) and 219 million total impressions.

How do you use Vine to promote your business? Are there any other secret Vine marketing tips you would like to share with us? Please leave your comments below.

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