Recently our sister blog The Employer Law Report told you about Vine, a mobile video application owned by Twitter that allows users to capture and share short looping six-second videos on Twitter. The app will no doubt cause corporations more social media headaches as employees start recording Vine workplace videos — especially with 13 million users since the app was rolled out five months ago.
Now, Facebook has followed suit and introduced its own short-video service that is built into Instagram, the photo-sharing app that Facebook acquired last year. (Facebook also rolled out support for hashtags, which were pioneered by and are a staple of Twitter.)
The video function is already available through Instagram, meaning the millions of Instagram users can instantly use the video function. There is no need for a second app download, like with the Vine app. Now, when a user goes to take a photo on Instagram, the user will see a movie camera icon. A simple tap of the camera icon will engage the video mode and allow the user to record up to fifteen seconds of video through the Instagram camera.
But you know what this means, right? More corporate headaches. With Vine, users can only record six-second videos. With Instagram Video users can record fifteen seconds of video – that’s one and a half times longer than videos on Vine and, in turn, one and a half times more headaches for corporations. (It’s probably going to force everyone to watch commercials again. Those were about fifteen seconds weren’t they?)
While Vine only allows users to post to Facebook and Twitter, Instagram allows uses to post videos to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, Email and foursquare. If interested, techcrunch.com did a great comparison of the two, here.
Takeaways: With Twitter’s Vine, and now Facebook’s Instagram Video, videos are set to replace photographs as a corporation’s newest social media headache. So, as more and more employees are bringing their mobile devices to work, corporations must stay on top of these technological developments to ensure that their workplace policies apply as broadly as possible to cover all new technologies, including these new video apps, as they develop. This includes implementing proper policies like Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and training so employers make clear what employees are and are not allowed to share on these new social media video platforms.