6 Reasons Why Vine and Instagram Videos Are Great for Your Business Short-form social videos can turn your cinematic dreams into marketing gold.

The introduction this year of Vine and Instagram videos spawned a new kind of content marketing: the short-form social video.

What does this mean? It means video that's super-snappy: just six seconds for vine, 15 seconds for Instagram. And it comes with social media sharing elements baked right in, not bolted on. Vine is owned by Twitter, so videos can be embedded in an in-stream tweet; Instagram is owned by Facebook and is an active social photo platform in its own right.

I am a sucker for content-creation tools that are intuitive and flexible, as well as intrinsically social. So I love the opportunity these platforms present. Visual content is, of course, engaging: People are four times more likely to share Vines than other videos on Twitter, according to one study, which also noted that five Vines are being shared on Twitter every second. That's not as hyper a channel as YouTube, perhaps, but it still translates into almost half a million Vines a day.