Sometimes one waits years for a mobile-friendly video marketing app and then three come along at once. Hot on the heels of Vine and Instagram comes Mixbit, a new ultra-short video app from YouTube that’s designed for iOS devices.
Besides offering one more second of video length than Instagram, Mixbit, which went live last Thursday, provides a number of new options with interesting marketing potential.
Perhaps the most immediately interesting of these, from a social media marketing point of view, is the ease with which Mixbit videos can be uploaded to social networks like Facebook and Twitter, giving a boost to campaigns that hinge on rapid interaction with customers and fans. Used as part of a carefully developed social media strategy, they can enable a company to be highly responsive and use figureheads or joke videos to create an engaging presence.
The other stand-out feature of Mixbit is the option it offers to combine up to 260 short videos into a longer film. This makes it easy to build up character-based campaigns from soundbites or to put together catalogues from bite-sized product descriptions. It also makes it possible for businesses to put together combination videos from video snippets solicited from the public, eg. through competitions.
Mixbit videos can be edited within the app itself, so a longer video can be prepared for publication from 16 second clips with no need for uploading first. One of its main disadvantages is that it has, as yet, no option for adding comments. This may mean, however, that popular videos are more likely to be republished, and individual clips may have the potential to go viral after being embedded within different longer videos. All Mixbit videos are anonymous and the developers have stressed their desire to build up a social resource. What this effectively means is that promotional clips developed early in the app’s history could become key pieces of stock footage, ensuring their ongoing redistribution throughout its lifetime.
With online video an increasingly important part of successful social media marketing, Mixbit will be welcomed by businesses keen to employ new tools. It’s remarkably simple to use so there’s no need to budget time for learning it. Popular videos can provide free advertising and can be embedded on a company’s webpage to add to its social cachet.
Mixbit is currently available for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, with an Android version expected soon. Early adopters are likely to have a lot of advantages over latecomers, by establishing a presence and getting attention early on.
Xcellimark can advise on the best way to engage with apps as part of the marketing mix and can help businesses develop integrated marketing plans that connect them effectively with the rest of their corporate strategy.
