There are tons of original, honest Viners on Vine. They’ve been the key reason for the app’s success over the course of the past 11 months, and set the bar in terms of quality for these videos. Unfortunately, there have been many up-and-comers that are showing us how NOT to make vines, and it’s something that should be addressed.
There’s three horribly annoying trends making their way across the app at the moment, and it’s causing some debate between the Vine community and killing what made Vine so unique. If you’re considering making videos in the near future please AVOID these three things.
1) Make YouTube Clips Your Punchline
Words can’t describe how irritating and unoriginal this is. YouTube punchline Vines are basically videos that start out with the Viner saying, “When I don’t wanna go to school I’m just like…” and then cut to a snippet of a YouTube video that everyone has seen far too many times that serves as the joke punchline. Thousands of Viners make these videos because they’re extremely easy to make them, they’re popular, they’re relatable and don’t require any creativity. Yes, people share them like crazy, but it’s pretty much a cop-out. Those that have been on Vine for a long time despise these videos, and skip right over them.
People want to see your personality, not some other video that you found on the Internet. If viewers wanted to watch YouTube, guess what? They’d go to YouTube. Use your brain and show us who you are. Here’s an example of the videos that I’m talking about.
2) Trade Revines With Other Viners
In the past two months, several Viners have come accumulated close to a million followers just by trading revines with one another. If you aren’t familiar with Vine lingo, a revine is basically like a retweet on Twitter. A person can share your video on their profile by pressing the “revine” button. There are two reasons why this is bad.
First, it’s just plain annoying. When people log on and click on your account, they don’t want to see a bunch of revined videos on your page. They came there for you, not for someone else.
Second, most of the people that have started this revine alliance are creating videos that just plain suck, and their content is making the Popular Now page, (a compilation of the day’s most liked and revined videos,) and not allowing room for Viners that are truly original and talented. There will be times when a Viner’s video will get revined by fifteen other popular Viners, which means more likes and revines, which also means that bad video makes the Popular Now page. If you want to get followers, find another way to do it.
3) Spam the Comments Telling People To Check Out Your Videos
This has been going on pretty much since the beginning, and it’s just a nuisance to everyone, especially the Viners that are trying to read their comments and have to sift through spam. These comments are other people just starting out on Vine that say things like, “Hey everyone come look at my videos, please!!!” or “Watch my videos!! I’m really funny, I promise!!” This doesn’t really work anymore, because people just scroll right past them, or barely glance at them and get disgusted.
If you are funny or creative, don’t worry, you will get noticed. Vine is a VERY sharing-friendly app. I’ve seen people with less than 100 followers blow up because one of their videos got 200,000 likes and 150,000 revines. That’s actually very common. If you’re just starting out, be patient, and put some work into your craft. People WILL notice, and you will reap the benefits.
