Have You Ever Heard of Jerome Jarre?

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Vine & Snapchat: How Your Brand Can Benefit From the Newest Video Social Media

By Martin McCauley, Bayshore Solutions’ Business Development Team

If you haven’t heard of Jerome, you might want to check with your teenage daughter (if you have one available), because she probably knows him.

Jerome Jarre is a 24 year old social media superstar.

Social media, you mean like Facebook?

No, not like Facebook.

Facebook is so 2012 (per that teenaged daughter), and it’s where you go if you want to find out what your aunt Ruth or grandma Betsy are up to. Jerome Jarre is dominating the newest social media platforms called Vine and Snapchat where you will be hard pressed to find a lot of grandmas.

In two short years, Jarre has amassed over 8 million followers on Vine (to put that in perspective Justin Bieber has just over 3 million). In less than year, Jarre has garnered over 1 million followers on Snapchat.

Vine and Snapchat are relatively new video-based social media platforms.

Video based, you mean like YouTube?

No, not like YouTube.

Vine and Snapchat are both based on short-form video (very short).
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Vine videos are about 6 seconds, and Snapchat records video in 10-second chunks. Several of those 10-second chunks could be “strung” together to create stories, but even the longest stories are typically no longer than a minute.

So if you had concerns that we were already developing into an attention-span-challenged society, you will not be encouraged by the meteoric rise of these two most recent platforms both of which, by the way, only appear to be getting bigger. As of the writing of this blog post, Vine and Snapchat each have valuations in the BILLIONS (not a typo).

Wow, so they must be making a lot of money, right?

No, they are making exactly $0 (also not a typo).

Both Vine and Snapchat are completely “ad free”. Quotes are added to “ad free” because you can find plenty of brands on both platforms. On Vine, you will find companies like Target, The Gap, Volkswagon, and a small Connecticut-based firm called GE. And on Snapchat you will see an entirely new section called Discover, exclusively devoted to big brands.

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What the monetization models will be on each of these platforms is still to be decided, in the meantime, here are the questions you need to ask yourself from a marketing perspective:

• Why should it only be these global (and very smart) brands that get to capitalize on these new extremely popular platforms?
• Does my brand have a message that I need to start communicating through this latest and greatest evolution of the social media landscape?

Facebook has recently made it a lot harder for brands to get their messages into users’ feeds without actually paying for the message as a Facebook ad or promoted post. We can expect the same sorts of changes on Vine and Snapchat in the not too distant future.

Those brands that effectively take advantage of these early days enjoy the benefit of a free marketing platform while at the same time developing a foundation on those platforms that only helps when they do finally figure out how to monetize.

Bayshore Solutions’ digital marketing experts can help brands understand the social media marketing opportunities relevant to your business and navigate how to best use the newest social channels to reach your audiences. Contact us to learn more today.