Brand dig: Vine, Meerkat and Peach: are hypes making or breaking social media brands?
In this blog series, researcher Harry Symington digs into the world of social media and discusses brands, news, trends and examples that have made the digital headlines.
This week, Harry looks at what caused the death of Twitter owned video app Vine, and how it may have lost its relevancy with it's users. Plus, how Meerkat saw a gap in the market, but immediately got pushed aside, and Peach (remember them?) found itself having its 15 minutes of fame before the bubble burst...
Vine lost its relevance amongst those that mattered most
It was once described as a “kind of mobile, social MTV” and the future in viral video for the entertainment industry. But after just three-and-a-half years of its six-second videos, Vine is being killed off by its parent company Twitter. The reason? Vine never became the buzzing community for independent creators that Twitter had hoped it would. So why have Viners been leaving the platform?
While it originally launched as a platform for people to share six-second lifecasts, Vine rapidly became a hub for meme-makers, comedians, and perhaps most surprisingly: up-and-coming musicians. The most successful was Shawn Mendes who managed to turn Vine fame into two No. 1 albums. Vine, it seemed, was the hottest new social platform that could rival YouTube for nurturing social stars.
But lately the platform has been losing its relevancy amongst the creators that it so depends on. According to Markerly (which tracks online influencers) 52% of the platform’s top users have left the platform as of January 2016. And they’re moving to Snapchat – perhaps because it lets people record 10-second videos and share photos with custom filters.
So while other platforms have adapted their products, with Instagram introducing video and Snapchat rolling out its Stories feature, Vine has remained stagnant nike air max 90 black cheap. And it’s certainly not uncommon to see a platform explode in the social space and then die out. Now it’s a waiting game to see which platforms benefit the most from Vine’s disappearance.
Meerkat’s hype didn’t match its user base
Just like Vine before it, MeerKat – the live-streaming video app – stormed onto the social media scene ready to take its place next to Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. But one year on and MeerKat has been pulled from the iOS App Store – and it’s only really mentioned alongside other failed apps like Beme or Ello. So what happened?
The app had its 15 minutes of fame at the South by Southwest festival in 2015. Meerkat was used to live stream everything at the festival, from the gigs to the conferences and even stroll through the area. And the exposure helped the parent company get $14 million in venture captial funding. But shortly after, it was dealt a series of blows: Twitter cut off access to its social graph, then launched its own live-streaming platform Periscope, and Facebook created its own version called Live.
Clearly competing against the very social platforms it was once meant to compliment was never going to work. But one problem that hampered it from the start was the disconnect between the extraordinary media attention it gained and its actual traction amongst users. So once the coverage died down, the reality became evident.
But the founders seemed to have learnt from it and have built a new private broadcasting app called Houseparty, which has quietly gained almost 1 million users.
Peach set a record for the boom bust cycle
The boom bust cycle of apps is getting even shorter. It used to take a year or even a few months, before those hyped-up apps (that end up failing) finally bite the dust. But messaging app Peach demonstrated that the hype cycle can be over within less than 24 hours.
Peach launched in January 2016 as an alternative messaging app with a home screen akin to Twitter’s interface – no direct messaging, just a stream of updates from your friends. It had a few nifty features, like “magic words” where you type ‘GIF’ or ‘location’ and it triggers a bunch of options to choose from. But that’s about it.
However, the app still gained an unjustified amount of media coverage – in part because it was developed by a Vine co-founder. The attention propelled the app to No. 85 on the U.S. iPhone downloads chart, but two days later and it had already slipped to No. 129. Early declines such as these are usually a clear sign that the app isn’t going to last long, irrespective of huge the hype was. Retention outside a core group of users is what really matters – and the tech press too often ignores that reality.
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