Socialbakers recently conducted a head-to-head comparison of tweets containing Vine and YouTube videos, finding that the former were seeing “surprising” engagement rates. Now Socialbakers is at it again, this time including Instagram videos and broadening its level of analysis. Based on a sample of 1,141 brand profiles and almost 6,000 tweets over the span of about 1 month, the study indicates that tweeted Vine videos are averaging 20 retweets, compared to 19 for YouTube and 7 for Instagram. But there’s an important caveat.
That caveat? Not all of the brands tweeted all 3 video types. As a result, the data could be skewed according to the popularity and relative engagement profiles of the brands that tweeted the videos. Socialbakers provided an example of a brand (Dove global) that had tweeted all 3, finding that its engagement rate was multiples higher for YouTube (0.0359%) than for Instagram (0.0073%) and Vine (0.0060%) videos. That’s despite the overall study results demonstrating a far smaller gap in engagement rate between tweets containing YouTube videos and those containing Vine videos (0.036% vs. 0.021%). In the overall figures, both are far ahead of tweeted Instagram videos, which see an average engagement rate of 0.011%.
Despite not controlling for the brand factor, the study results offer a window into what appears to be a rapidly emerging space. It’s early days yet for both Vine and Instagram video, of course, and the number of tweeted videos analyzed confirms that to be the case. Of the 5,933 tweets analyzed, 4,863 (82%) tweeted YouTube videos, while roughly twice as many tweeted Vine (713; 12%) as Instagram (357; 6%) videos. (The tweets analyzed were from June 19 – July 19; Instagram video was launched on June 20.)
Given that those platforms are still relatively nascent, it will be interesting to see how their engagement and retweet rates move once they become more broadly adopted.
