You’ve heard of Vine, right? Of course you have–and we’ll go out on a sturdy limb in suggesting that most of our readers probably don’t think of Twitter’s six-second loop tool as the Next Big Thing in digital marketing.
This week, however (as reported on our sister site Lost Remote), the company unveiled the latest step in its campaign to appeal to those of the agency persuasion: loop counts.
What does that alien phrase mean? Metrics to measure how many times people have clicked on given “vines” have been around for a while, but this one tells us how many times a clip has looped–and it somehow controls for the “open tab” factor as well. The idea is that viewers will watch the most compelling Vines repeatedly, thereby increasing brand retention, etc.
In short, we can now get a better sense of how much Vine campaigns are worth. Given recent agency trends focusing on more accurate measurement for social media campaigns, some think that this means more shops will have to take Vine seriously.
A few marketing experts weigh in after the jump.
Luke Carrell, Director of Strategy at We Are Social:
“For many marketers, Vine continues to be a bit of an enigma, with its younger audience and tendency to reward quick, quirky humor that can be difficult to get exactly right. While many brands have embraced the platform as an outlet for one-off creative exercises, more robust metrics such as the introduction of content impressions (e.g. Loops) opens the door for gathering insights that can help build smarter content plays over the long term.”
Adam Kornblum, Social Media Director and Senior Content Strategist, Social@Ogilvy:
“Loop counts is important for agencies and brands because it provides another way to show scale and it gives us a sense of reach. Likes and re-vines are great indicators of engagement but as we have seen with YouTube, videos are often written about because of views over it simply being liked. From a public facing standpoint, loop counts is an important metric of success. It’s a smart move by Twitter.”
Eric Dahan, CEO of marketing startup Instabrand (which focuses on pairing clients with social “influencers”, or teenagers with lots of followers) is more enthusiastic:
“The new ‘loop’ metric on Vine allows marketers to overcome a huge hurdle. Before today, we would have to sell brands influencer videos without knowing the impressions. The only knowledge we as marketers had was the potential impressions or ‘Reach’ ( the total number of followers), and the engagements (the total likes, comments). This left the most important and standard layer of the conversion funnel out: the Impression.
Now, Vine is a platform that can be taken seriously by marketers and properly monetized. This is not only changing media buyers’ purchasing behavior but also how influencers are getting paid. In addition, influencers’ incentives are now aligned with those of brands since they’re better able to charge based on impressions: the better the content, the better the payout.”
Sal Basile, Senior Content Strategist at Ready Set Rocket:
“With the added ‘loop’ count, a level of tracking has finally been added to determining the success of Vine content, giving agencies and brands new initiative to dive into the medium. While social engagement does offer metrics to track in terms of how content resonates with an audience, tracking ‘views,’ so to speak, allow brands to see which content is interesting enough to keep fans watching, returning and sharing–in turn, honing content creation and dictating content direction.”
…and a more skeptical opinion from Jeff Melton, Chief Analytics & Media Officer, MRY:
“Every media platform needs to report on Reach and Frequency as a basic, fundamental requirement in order to help marketers validate their investment’s efficiency. Vine’s recent move is a small step in the right direction to help validate its value as a platform. However, impressions, views, or Loops alone won’t cut it as marketers need to efficiently reach the exact target audience that will move the needle on their business.
Vine’s unique functionality allows for more frequency, or Loops, of a message, but if marketers aren’t able to validate who was reached with that frequency, the metric is of lesser value. Even with the new Loop metric, marketers should be careful not to assume that the same frequency benchmarks for other media channels will hold true in Vine. Testing will be key.”
Something tells us most AgencySpy readers remain even more critical than Melton, but we still think you’ll have to admit that this clip is pretty cool.