Vine is coming back, so get ready now: Rob Mayhew at M360
Delivering the opening keynote at Mumbrella360 on Wednesday morning, adland’s favourite social media star Rob Mayhew has predicted the comeback of super-shortform video platform Vine.
Despite his acknowledgement that it would be difficult for any platform — new or returning — to really take off in today’s market, he said “Vine is coming back”.
In 2012, Vine was acquired by Twitter (now Elon Musk’s X). In its first incarnation, Vine allowed video snippets up to 6 seconds. At its peak in 2015, the platform had around 200 million users . Popularity quickly dropped, however, and it was shut down in 2016.
While there has been no official announcement, Musk’s posts on X indicate he is considering bringing it back.
“It’s very rare to have that ‘Tiktok thing’ where it just becomes a huge part of what everyone does,” Mayhew told the crowd.
Mayhew presenting at Mumbrella360 on Wednesday morning
Mayhew said brands and agencies need to get on top of social media trends before they actualise — they need to be shaping the culture on the platform, not hijacking it when it is too late.
“Don’t just wait for it to come back, start thinking about it right now,” he said. “People are craving community, Gen Z in particular, and people with similar opportunity, and for brands, this is a perfect opportunity.”
But it isn’t the only social platform that should be prioritised. Mayhew also stressed to the crowd that Linkedin is “being slept on”. This dovetails with recent research that emphasised the steady growth of LinkedIn as a marketing platform.
“It has such untapped potential, not just for B2B but for B2C too,” Mayhew said. “There’s so many big opportunities on there. You can really stand out.”
Mayhew said that he knows when he posts content on LinkedIn it will be shared and engaged with (he has135,000 followers). And now, it’s the same for the brands he works with.
Title slide from Rob Mayhew’s keynote
“Linkedin and creators on Linkedin is huge, there’s so many more now than there was four, five years ago. There’s just good quality, very professional creators who have big audiences.”
“People like to see interesting entertainment content that’s still within the Linkedin world.”
An example he shared was getting agency staff to create content, almost treating it like an EGC (Employee Generated Content) platform.
“Maybe you want to create a sitcom in your agency, maybe you create fake ads for brands you wanna work it, there’s possibility on that app that people are sleeping on.”
On the flip side, Mayhew shared his distain for Meta platforms, particularly Facebook, as well as Musk’s X.
“They’re very greedy,” he said of Meta’s platforms. “You could make all this content, then you post it and only 5% of your audience would see it, unless you pay. And it drives me mad.”
He did acknowledge, however, that it’s gotten better, only because “they’ve been following and stealing from Tiktok”.
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Lauren McNamara is the associate editor at Mumbrella, covering the agency beat. She joined in November 2022 as editorial assistant, after completing a Bachelor of Communications (Journalism) at UTS.
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