Vine Gives Video Marketing a Twist on Twitter [VIDEO]

Vine has been shaking up the tech, advertising, and media worlds.

Earlier this week, Mashable reported on how brands are now using Vine for ads in their Twitter streams. For example, Wheat Thins posted a video promoting its tag #MUSTHAVEWHEATTHINS, while General Electric put up a video of its logo being drawn, in stop animation, on a piece of large paper.

 Vine is currently an app only for iPhones. The beta lets its users produce six-second videos to share on its website, as well as on Twitter and Facebook. Touch screen is required for recording, and the videos come out as “something between a video and an animated gif,” says The Huffington Post. There is no editing involved, and users can’t upload the video from a camera roll. “There’s no way to edit the finished video. Nor is there a way- at present- to upload a video from the camera roll. What you made is what you made.”

Right now, companies are trying to master social video, just like Instagram led the way with social photos, writes Eliza Kern of GigaOm. Twitter is investing in Vine “because there’s potential for a huge payoff for the company that finally gets social video right.”

Twitter and Instagram were feuding just last month. Twitter, it seems, wants to compete when it comes to social media sharing.

There have already been problems with Vine, however. It’s been a victim of porn, and the company had to erase and hashtags #sex, #nude, #porn, and #naked.

On Jan. 29, the company was temporarily shut down services. As Jennifer Van Grove points out, Twitter had a lot of “fail whales” and outages in its beginning stages as well.