Facebook adds 15 second videos to Instagram, a marketing tool to compete with Vine

by : John Stewart June 20, 2013

Vine is a very popular social-media tool but it really took off as a marketing device when Marvel used it to show off the first ever Vine-created trailer for ‘The Wolverine’. Since then brands, actors, musicians and retailers have been using it to tease announcements and upcoming releases.

Capitalizing on the trend, Facebook has announced that Instagram will allow 15sec videos for user-captured content. This will also allow media and entertainment companies to create new marketing and advertisement clips. “We need to do what video what we did to photos,” Instagram CEO and co-founder Kevin Systrom announced to the press this morning.

Instagram said the 15 second limit was set so that it couldn’t “constrain your creativity” but I should point out that 15sec is also the minimum advertising block that most advertisers and clips are priced at. The average TV commercial is 30 seconds, but you can also make a 15 second version of the same ad to be paired with another advertisement.

Twitter owned Vine allows six-second video clips on social sites, it was designed as a social-media tool not an advertising tool (it just became that). Also announced by Systrom, over 130 million people use Instagram each month and have shared over 16 billion images.