Vine's Death - A case for investing in owned engagement platforms.

Over the last ten years, the pendulum had swung from building your branded community (web 2.0) to building your community where the people are and abandon the idea of trying to make your own, remember when Skittles dumped their homepage for live Twitter feed? 

With the recent news of Vine closing, and joining the era of social media platforms that grew to a massive size (200 million monthly users), had brands following in droves with piles of cash to develop content for the platform (10% of the world's top brands were active users), paying for influencers (up to $50,000 for a post) but the biggest loss is the community cultivated (14% of the US population).

What happens when you place your bets on the communities that at a moments notice close their doors. 

 I 100% agree that we should engage with people in the places where they spend time whether it' Vine, Snapchat or whatever is coming next. With major platforms like Vine closing and Twitter in a questionable state, it should though make you evaluate how reliant your community engagement is on a platform and whether it's worth investing in building a consumer engagement platform that you control. 

Building your engagement platform does not mean you need to create your a branded version of something that already exists or has died. Instead, understand the motivations of why people participate in communities and create something relevant to your brand that fills this need. According to Global Web Index, the top 5 reasons are to stay in touch with friends, stay up-to-date with news, fill spare time,  find content or to share opinions. 

When planning for 2017 make sure to have a balanced community mix as part of your consumer engagement strategy.