Vine Is Closing: Content on Platforms You Do Not Own

What Twitter announced yesterday

Twitter said yesterday that it will discontinue the Vine mobile app in the coming months. Vine, the app for six-second looping videos, was bought by Twitter shortly before its launch in early 2013.

Nothing changes immediately. Twitter says people will be able to download their videos, that the Vine website will stay online so existing videos can still be watched, and that users will be told before anything changes.

For most people it is a curiosity. For businesses that spent three years building a following there, it is a lesson arriving at their own expense.

The videos can be saved. The followers cannot.

What a business on Vine stands to lose

• The followers, who belong to the platform, not to you.
• The videos, unless you download them or kept the originals.
• The comments and likes that showed people cared.
• Embedded Vines on your own website, if playback ever stops.
• The habit of posting that kept the business visible.

The first is the real loss. A follower count is an audience you were allowed to reach on someone else's terms, and when the terms change there is no list to take away.

Every platform is rented

Vine is unusual only in closing outright. The others change their terms constantly.

Facebook pages already reach a small share of their own followers without paying, and the News Feed change announced in June favours friends and family further.

Instagram now orders its feed by interest rather than time, and Twitter offers to show the best tweets first.

None of these was a decision the businesses on those platforms had any say in. That is the nature of building on land you rent.

Renting is fine. Treating it as ownership is the mistake.

What you actually own

Three things belong to the business whatever any platform decides.

Your website, on your own domain. Nobody else can close it, limit how many people see it or reorder its pages.

Your email list, built with consent. It goes wherever you go, and a message to it reaches the inbox rather than a feed someone else sorts.

And your original files: the photographs, videos and words in full quality, stored where the business can find them. Everything else is a copy on someone else's server.

Keep the originals

Most social posts are made on a phone and uploaded straight from it, and the phone is replaced every couple of years.

Make it a habit to keep the original of everything posted anywhere: a shared folder, by year and month, with full-resolution files and each caption in a text file beside them.

That folder is what lets a business move to another platform, fill a gallery on its own site, or simply survive the loss of a phone.

Some platforms offer an export of an account's posts. Others offer none, which is one more reason not to rely on them for the only copy.

A worked example

A two-person screen printing shop in a light industrial unit started posting Vine loops in 2014: a squeegee pulling ink across a screen, a stack of shirts coming off the dryer, a soccer team's order folded and boxed.

Other printers liked them, and so did some customers. A handful were embedded on the shop's website, on a page explaining how screen printing works.

Yesterday afternoon the owners read that the app was closing.

They spent the rest of the day listing the loops worth keeping, mostly finished orders, and found originals for some in the camera roll of the phone that recorded them. The rest will be downloaded when Twitter provides the means.

The embedded Vines on their site are being replaced with copies hosted on the site itself.

A new page, the press room, will collect the best loops and a photograph of each finished order, and every social profile will point to it.

Use platforms to point home

None of this means leaving social media. The audiences there are real, and so are the customers some of them become.

It means changing what each post is for. A post can carry a short version of the content and point to the full version on your site, where it stays put and can be found in search.

It also means giving followers a way to become something you own: an email sign-up, an offer that needs a visit to the site, a reason to bookmark the gallery.

A follower who joins the newsletter is still reachable if the platform disappears.

Post video where it can be kept

Short video does not have to live on one app. Twitter now plays video in tweets without it eating into the 140 characters, Instagram takes clips of up to 60 seconds, and Facebook plays video in the feed.

The same original file can go to each of them, and to your own site, where it can sit on the page it illustrates.

Spreading content this way is not about being everywhere. It is about never again letting one company hold the only copy.

The counter-case

For a business that posted a few Vines for fun and moved on, this changes very little. Download them if you like, and remove any links to the profile from the website.

Platforms also give reach your own site cannot match on its own. A business that abandoned social media to protect itself from closures would be giving up something real.

And the website itself needs looking after to be the safe place: a domain you control, hosting you can reach, backups you have tested.

The advice stands: post where your customers are, keep the originals, and make the website and the list the things you build.

Keeping your own copies

1. List every platform the business posts on.
2. Export what each one allows you to download.
3. Gather originals from phones and cameras.
4. Store them in one folder by year and month.
5. Replace embeds on your site with your own copies.
6. Add a sign-up link to every profile.
7. Watch for Twitter's download if you used Vine.

Step three cannot wait. Phones are replaced, wiped and lost, and the camera roll is often the only place a full-quality original of a post still exists.

Posting video and photos on Twitter itself is covered in photos no longer count against Twitter's 140 characters.

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West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.