Brands and organizations use Vine, the Twitter-owned micro-video sharing platform, to make creative statements about themselves and their products. These 6-second videos take a lot skill and planning to execute properly, and it's difficult to know what kind of returns a well-made Vine really provides.
On Tuesday, Vine introduced a simple new measurement that should help users to better understand how their creations perform. Vine videos now include a "Loops" metric, tracking how many times a Vine is played much the same way YouTube videos track views.
Before Tuesday, Vine users could measure their success based on how many other users shared (re-Vined) and "Liked" their videos. The new loop tracking feature provides another way to track videos, although it still may not provide the best way to track a video's popularity.
Vines play and loop automatically once loaded, making it difficult to tell if the Vine is actually being watched or not. In theory, a Vine video could be open on a user's page for hours at a time without that user even seeing to the part of the page where it actually appears. The loop count would be increasing the whole time.
Still, the loop count may attract more marketers to the platform. The metric is easily understood, bearing similarities to other view metrics that organizations already put money against, and it could give organizations who want to try the service out a better idea of their potential reach.
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