Q: Instagram Video vs Vine: How does adoption and use compare among ski resort marketers?

photo of the author Gregg Blanchard

It’s hard to believe that it’s been over a year since Vine was released and nine months since Instagram video made its debut. With both platforms past the honeymoon phase, we wanted to see how resorts are using these two platforms and the results they are getting. Wouldn’t you know, that’s exactly what we did.

The Goods
To find our answer we looked at Vines and Instagram videos created by ski resorts between Nov 1, 2013 and Mar 1, 2014. To find individual stats, however, we had to take a slightly different approach as Vine lacks an API to pull those numbers.

Instead, we decided to only analyze the Vine and Instagram Video content that was shared to Twitter. It’s not perfect because not all content is shared outside of the original network, but without access to Vine stats, it seems to be the fairest comparison we can do. Here are a few key stats.

In terms of overall adoption, Instagram is clearly more popular than Vine. But once you get into actual usage for video and how that content performs on Twitter, Vine is the clear winner. A resort on Vine shares nearly twice as many videos as a resort that creates videos through the Instagram platform.

What This Means
With this data set we weren’t looking for takeaways as much as we were looking to find out what adoption and usage is like between these two platforms. But even then, there is still an interesting question that arises from these metrics.

Specifically we’re referring to the lack of inline-display support for Instagram content. Because Vine videos can play directly from Twitter, it’s little surprise that within the walls of Twitter this content sees better performance. What this doesn’t answer, however, is if these interactions are more useful on Twitter than within the content platform the videos were designed for.

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