THE POWER OF THE PLATFORM: VISUAL STORYTELLING ON SOCIAL NETWORKS 107 If your brand wants to connect with teens, college kids, and young pro- fessionals, Tumblr is a great platform to find a new audience. Take time to get to know the platform before you start to post, and think hard about simplifying your brand message to get the most out of the platform’s mix of visual content. Even if you don’t have a brand that lends itself to your own visual content, many organizations have built a strong following curating other people’s posts to build a community around their expertise. Vine Lately, the craze for Vine—the app that lets you post short, maximum 6-second video footage loops—has gotten brands thinking about how to use the tool to showcase products and expand their social media content. The app’s popularity has been exceptional: within three months of its 129 January 2013 launch, Vine had grown to be the top free app on iTunes. Vine is similar to Twitter (the company that owns it) and Instagram in that users share video clips on the social network, but the clips can also be embedded in Twitter and Facebook posts. Initially launched on Apple, Vine is now also available on Android, so expect its use to leap from its 130 current number of 13 million users as more fans get hooked. The app makes it simple to record your clips simply by tapping your smartphone screen—the app only records while the screen is being pressed, so you can either record one continuous shot, or you can record using stop-motion filming to give a speeded-up effect and condense a lon- ger event into the 6-second limit. Vine also records sound, so you have to think about the audio element of your videos as well. People can like, comment on, and share your footage with other image sharing networks, so clips can go viral across networks. You can also tag your clips in the same way you would with Instagram photos and Tumblr posts. Vine offers marketers as many ways of telling your brand’s story as photos—and maybe more. What can you say in 6 seconds? The speed