Tide Halloween Vine Videos Are Great, But No One Is Watching!

I’m so over the Vine craze. Can we just call it now. Vine videos are great, they’re funny (sometimes) and many can be artistic and even creative, but the fact of the matter is, people don’t seem to really like brand produced Vines.

Yes, I’ve read the news. I’ve seen the stats. I know that Vine saw over 400% growth between the first and 3rd quarters of 2013. It’s been well documented that it’s the world’s fastest growing app… But… so what?

I’m all about using social media to help advance my client’s objectives. I see Vines working for sports teams, news outlets and entertainment oriented clients. But for consumer product oriented brands and businesses?  Not so much.

Sure, there are some wildly popular “vinelebrities” who are crushing it with Vines. Some have HUGE audiences. And it may make sense for some brands to partner up with them for the greatest exposure, but let’s be real. Even some of the best Vine vids aren’t getting much traction with the general public.

To make matters worse, I’m on Twitter all day and I hardly see any Vine videos in my stream. So you have to wonder if there’s any real use for Vine videos for most consumer based products.

Let’s look at an example. Tide has 112,000 followers on Twitter. Tide also has 3.9 million fans on Facebook. For Halloween Tide is running a campaign where they are launching a series of Vine videos. They are posting the Vines as videos on Facebook as well.

In my opinion, the videos are well produced, look great and are quite creative. I’d have to give Tide props for creating some pretty good content. But unfortunately, their efforts went basically for naught.

Check out this first one that they posted on October 18, 2013.

Brace yourself. Our first Halloween Vine is pretty terrifying. You might just get #ScaredStainless. #Carrie https://t.co/nXdTfPa30l

— Tide (@tide) October 18, 2013

I think you’ll agree that this is pretty good work, but as of today, the Tweet had only 200 or so re-tweets and about the same number of favorites. Hardly earth shattering numbers. Especially not for a major brand like Tide.

Here’s the second Vine released by Tide.

Mother gets a little #psycho about dirty laundry. #Halloween #ScaredStainless https://t.co/uFsRBu8sGI

— Tide (@tide) October 21, 2013

Again, pretty good piece, but the audience didn’t care. It received 72 re-tweets and 69 favorites. The audience actually DECREASED for the second installment.

The third episode was released today and although it’s very early, it appears to be performing the worst of the bunch so far.

This house is clean. #Poltergeist #ScaredStainless #Halloween https://t.co/B8hqFoVHDX

— Tide (@tide) October 24, 2013

As mentioned above, the Vines are being released on Facebook as well as Facebook videos. They’re not seeing much success there either. One has 2,000 or so likes and the other around 7,000 likes. Remember, Tide has 3.9 Million fans on Facebook…so it’s obvious that these videos didn’t resonate with their fanbase.

Post by Tide.

Post by Tide.

I  could post many results like this. The Internet is littered with Vine videos created by advertising agencies and brands that fizzled out and died…on the vine.

I believe Vine vids, like most content, should be tailored for the audience that you reach. Most brands don’t have an audience that cares enough about their product to even spend 6 seconds watching micro-vids.

I see brand produced Instagram videos, that aren’t nearly as clever, routinely out performing Vine videos. Can we just all agree that outside of sports, entertainment and news, Vine videos simply don’t work for brands? It’s hard enough for us all to show the ROI in social media. Vine videos make it even tougher for us to overcome that unicorn of a hurdle.

I can’t imagine what it cost for Tide to produce these Vine videos. But suffice it to say, I’m pretty sure when their social team sold the execs on this initiative, they didn’t tell them to expect less than 1,000 engagements on Twitter.