Getting Followers

Created by @zvlasov

Contents

Getting Followers on the Vine App: the Right Way I

1. Make awesome vines regularly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What are awesome vines? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . How regularly should one make vines? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . To whom to cater? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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2. Have an active Vine live. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 The main principle. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Participate in contests. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 3. Get in the Popular Now category . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 What is the Popular Now category? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Hack: The best time to vine. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Which theme to choose? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Collaborate with another viner. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Channels Popular Now. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Note about VineFame . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

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1. Make Awesome Vines Regularly

What are awesome vines? How regularly should one make vines? To whom to cater?

1.Make Awesome Vines

What are awesome vines?

Getting Followers on the Vine App: the Right Way I II III

First lets define awesome vines. Awesome vines are short videos that have a great idea, with decent implementation and they fit perfectly in Vines standard 6 seconds. You cant really deliver big ideas or teach through Vine, however you can do it through YouTube. There are very few messages that can be delivered and digested in only 6 seconds. That 6 second-span leads to the most popular vines with thousands of likes for the comedy vines. Short jokes or funny life observations are easy to consume and understand. Being funny will definitely be the main reason for people to follow you. Unfortunately, you are either born with a good sense of humor or you arent. If you are wondering about other popular categories of vines, just take a look at the Explore tabs channels - Comedy, Art & Experimental, Cats, Dogs, etc. Before an update to version 1.3 in July 2013, Vine had completely different categories. It looked like this: (Figure 1). I would guess that they were chosen randomly. After 5 months of operating, Vine collected enough data to craft their channels according to the most popular categories and it led to what you can see now: (Figure 2) To make a vine that will fit into the Art & Experimental channel - you will have to tap into your creativity. Surf through that channel to get an idea of how it might look. Many creative vines are made using vines ability to stop shooting by lifting your finger, making changes while you are shooting and continuing to shoot. For

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Fugure 1: Vine 1.2

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Fugure 2: Vine 1.3

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1.Make Awesome Vines

Getting Followers on the Vine App: the Right Way

0.67 respectively. Given that these guys didnt start right after the Vine app appearance - we can average about 1 vine per day for Will and Josh and 1.5 vines for Eric. Pretty often, I would say. But dont forget - you cant force yourself into making good vines every day unless you enjoy doing it. For comics making vines is as natural as living their everyday life.

example you can start your vine in one place and end it at a completely different area. For example viner @ Michael LoPriore has a series of vines where he goes to sleep in his bed, but immediately wakes up in a parking lot from the honking sound. This is funny and creative at the same time. Just as with YouTube - the next most popular channels on vine are cats and dogs. Do you know how much time is wasted because instead of working or preparing for finals people prefer to watch another video with funny cats or puppies? Do you have a pet? Vine him / her day after day and surely enough you will gain thousands of followers. A good example is viner @Anne. She has gained 30k followers without using hashtags, liking other posts or following thousands of other viners. You may wonder: How did she do it? The answer is - her cat. You can even name a Vine account with the name of your favorite pet and place his picture on Vines Userpic - here is @BarkleyThePom. That little furry and fluffy creature has 145k followers without a single joke.

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To whom to cater?
Based on the kind of content the most followed vinelebreties create and comment the most, its easy to define who is in the Vine app audience. Here are a couple captions from the most popular viner @Josh Peck : When girls go on diets; Taylor Swift Lounge Singer ; SuperEmo; Teenage girl yelling at her parents while her brother tapes it; and Girls To Do List . Can you spot his audience? A regular viner is a 14 to 19-year-old American girl from an affluent suburb. Creating vines that might reflect experiences of a young Americans will get you a lot of exposure.

How regularly should one make vines?

Vinelebreties tend to create new vines at least every day. Just take a look at how many vines @Will Sasso, @ Eric Dunn or @Josh Peck have. Divide this number by the number of days that the Vine app has been around (you can count January 27th 2013 as an inception date). The number you get is an average number of vines per day. As of the 10th of August 2013, it will be 0.84; 1.19 and

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2. Have an Active Vine Life

The main principle. Participate in contests.

2.Have an Active Vine Life

The main principle.

Getting Followers on the Vine App: the Right Way

But he at least has original content and continued making vines. As of today (August 2013) he has 129.2k followers. That little trick with following thousands of other users exposed his content and drove his popularity.

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Once you have something to show people, you need to tell them about your existence. That can be achieved with these three features that the Vine app has - liking, commenting and following. There is no limit for all three actions and there will never be too much of liking, commenting and following. These techniques are known from the Instagram photo app. If you would follow and like vines of someone who has more than 200 followers, you have little chance of being noticed. So dont waste your time on someone who has many likes and followers. Instead focus on those who have very few followers and likes. To make sure that you arent following and liking a dead account (someone created an account and then abandoned it) check to see if there are any unique vines and likes made by that person. Being one of the first to like or comment on someones vine will attract that persons attention and he will be more likely to follow you, like your stuff and comment under your vines. There is probably software out there that can like and follow for you. Otherwise, there is no explanation how @AndreTimmons followed 307.7k viners (Figure 3). But his effort still paid off - about 10% of those he followed are now following him totaling 31.4k followers. When he posts, he scores at least 300 likes. On average he has about 1100 likes. And 99% of his vines are of a questionable quality - he vines videos from his computer. Here is a better example - @SeanSauce (Figure 4). Three weeks ago when I was preparing material for this guide he followed 206.7k viners and had 58.9k followers.

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Figure 3

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Figure 4

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2.Have an Active Vine Life

Participate in contests.

Getting Followers on the Vine App: the Right Way I II III

Many established and growing vinelebreties launch different contests to interact with their followers and the Vine community. Rules arent hard to follow and usually you have to shoot your own version of a certain vine and include a specified hashtag. Later, that person who started the contest might choose your vine and revine it. Your vine will appear on the home tab of all those who followed that person, giving you a tsunami of likes, revines and most likely followers.

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#THESTEVEN dance

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#THESTEVEN dance

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3. Get in the Popular Now Category

What is the Popular Now category? Hack: The best time to vine. Which theme to choose? Collaborate with another viner. Channels Popular Now.

3.Popular Now Category

What is the Popular Now category?

Getting Followers on the Vine App: the Right Way

leave the vine unuploaded by pressing your iPhones Home button. In the morning of the following day open the Vine app and finish uploading.

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If you have been using vine for your daily laugh or to procrastinate, you know about the popular category because thats where the best stuff is. To find the Popular Now page go to the Explore section. In addition to the main Popular Now, each channel - Comedy; Art & Experimental etc. has its own Popular category. Currently there are limited numbers of vines that get to the Popular Now category. Only 97 vines are on Popular Now.

Which theme to choose?

You are creative and have many great ideas for vine now, but which one to choose? The best source of vine themes is trending hashtags that are listed below all the channels in the explore category. Just like Twitters trending hashtags those hashtags are the most used within the Vine app at that moment. Some viners just put all the trending hashtags in their vines description, but that wont get you too far. People can see that you are just spamming the Vine with your irrelevant content. Instead, come up with a vine idea relevant to one of the hashtags. Another source of ideas is vines from the Popular Now category itself. After watching a majority of 97 popular vines you will have a couple of vine ideas to choose from. Make your own version of something that people are already making, but dont just copy it. Make it authentic.

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Hack: The best time to vine.

Videos getting on the Popular Now category are those with the most likes. In the evenings a lot of people surf the Vine app and many of them are liking something. That drives the number of likes and increases the gap between your videos and those of already vine-famous people. In the evening Popular Now videos tend to get at least 1k likes. Chances are your videos cant score that many. On the other hand - in the morning there are very few people browsing the Vine (only those who are really into vinomania). Fewer people means less likes and a smaller gap between the best and its ok. Therefore it takes fewer likes to get to the Popular Now page. With only 200 likes your video can be in the Popular Now page. If your inspirational muse is silent in the mornings or you simply cant vine because of school, or work, vine in the evenings but dont upload vines right away. Simply

Collaborate with another viner.

What made the Vine app different from other video application is the formation of the community around it. Back in May, early vinelebreties who were getting into the Popular Now category started to meet with each other and vine together. They were grouping based on locations: the LA area included @Simon Rex, @Riff Raff,

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3.Popular Now Category

Getting Followers on the Vine App: the Right Way

that category. Along the top, you will also see two tabs: Popular and New. So beside the main Popular Now each channel also has its own Popular category. Aim to get into that category first and only later to the main Popular Now. Choose a category wisely in which to post your freshly made vine. Comedy and Art channels can be more saturated with good content than Urban and News. So how many likes do you need to get into the Popular Now?

@Andy Milonakis, @Brittany Furlan and @Kc James; the New York area - @Jerome Jarre, @Nicholas Megalis, @ Keelayjams, @Meagan Cignoli, @Rudy Mancuso, and @ Michael LoPriore. When collaborating together you are exposing your content to other viners followers. Many of them will like it and follow you, too. The first to collaborate were @Will Sasso and @Chris Delia. Being friends in real life, it wasnt hard for them to merge their humor power and create funny vines. Find someone in your area by using location hashtags (name of your town or city). You can also create a vine and then add a nearby location. Later, go to your vine and click on your location. All vines from that area will appear. At first, I was planning to suggest that you look for only those viners who have a similar number of followers. In other words do not contact someone who has 5k followers if you have only 300. But then I realized that you should contact as many viners as you can. Viners just love to vine so they will be excited to collaborate with you. Dont be shy if you have fewer followers. Once you find someone - look for a contact information in the profile description. If there is no contact info you can make a vine asking if he/she would be interested in collaborating and put his/her vine name in your vines caption.

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Channels popular now.

After the new update to the 1.3 version in July 2013, the Vine app now has different channels - Comedy; Art & Experimental; Cats; etc. If you tap on one of the channels you will see vines that were submitted to

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3.Popular Now Category

Getting Followers on the Vine App: the Right Way I II III

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@Anne got into the Popular Now category with 95 likes within 1 hour, at 9:15 am EDT @TNHN got into the Popular Now category with 32 likes within 39 min at 9:17 am EDT @Michael Christian got into the Popular Now category with 39 likes within 24 min at 11:12 am EDT @Holly_GoLightly got into the Popular Now category with 92 likes within 54 min at 11:02 am EDT @Ferrari got into the Popular Now category with 92 likes within 1 hour at 11:06 am EDT

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3.Popular Now Category

Note about VineFame.

Getting Followers on the Vine App: the Right Way I II III

Dont assume that all current VineFamous people made their success with the Vine app. Many already had gained popularity through other social media - Twitter, Instagram or YouTube. All they had to do was mention the new app that they absolutely loved and ask their fans to follow. This fact, by the way, contributed a lot to Vines user base growth.

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YouTube star @Jenna Marbles has 1.1m followers on Vine.

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