The latest addition to the Twitter platform is Vine – a brand new mobile application that allows users to document experiences in six-second looping videos. Since going live in January, Vine has grown its active users by 50 percent in the past month. Even though the new app is in direct competition with iOS apps like Viddy, SocialCam and Cinemagram, Vine has seen extreme growth while others begin to decline within the social space. Not only have individuals been quick to adopt this latest ‘trend’, many brands have also started creating their own six-second videos, including the Gap, Dove, Urban Outfitters and from our own portfolio, Secret. Most of these videos are being made because brands want to be the first in the space. But how can companies use this app as in their digital and social strategies to rise above the rest?

Here are a few ideas to get started:

Tell your brand’s story: From the history of the company to showcasing product, Vine can help introduce the company to your new followers, creatively display products as a reminder for current customers, and show short, educational product demonstrations.
Get personal: With the ability to show “behind the scene” videos at the office, events, etc. Vine makes it accessible for companies to become instantly more relatable to fans — a strategy that will spark conversations with users and keep people close to the brand.
Create excitement around a new product: Thanks to this new mode of visual inspiration, fans can now get a ‘first look’ at upcoming products, uses and more. Vine will only help the launch of a new initiative or programs moving forward.
Promote a contest: Although many brands are excited about user generated content, videos have always been harder to obtain as compared to images. Vine could be a great middle ground to get fans engaged, while visually stimulating excitement around a contest or promotion.

xx Samantha

After being a community manager for several years, I know as much as anyone that we measure growth each week by creating content that gets fans to essentially Like, Share, Comment, RT or Reply. Study after study has shown that the more people engage with a brand, the more likely they are to buy it. But what if some of these fans are “fake”? For years, Facebook has been plagued by a growing number of “dummy” accounts were that were created for one purpose: to inflate the number of “Likes” (aka, fans), a metric that many still value above all. Designed to take advantage of the system, these fake accounts have not only affected engagement numbers and important Facebook statistics, but they’ve created major spam issues – a complete nightmare for any community manager.

Inspired (perhaps) by its IPO, Facebook thankfully made a move to purge its platform of phony profiles in late 2012, deleting all accounts that were duplicates, fraudulent or or spawned from malware. As it cleaned house, fan numbers on many Pages experienced major decreases. Those who had accumulated the most typically lost the most.

According to various contacts at Facebook, a large majority of its brand Pages they host have already been scrubbed. As a community manager, this is a tremendous relief because it means that all of my “Likes” are from genuine fans who can help my brand grow. No longer will companies have to worry about the 'quality' of their fan base in regards to 'fake' Likes, and instead will be able to better focus on programs that will further reach the ones they have.

Now if we could only get them to stop messing with EdgeRank…

xx Samantha

Image from Mashable.com