Vine Adds Video Embedding, Expands Social Sharing

Even though there’ve already been some clever brand uses of Vine, the reality is that Twitter’s six-second video sharing app has had an extremely limited feature set.

That’s starting to change today with a small-but-important update to Vine’s iOS app and its video post pages. Each video now has embed code for using on other websites, and can also be shared directly to Twitter and/or Facebook. Plus, as I’ll explain below, there’s a smart privacy feature built-in.

The social sharing has already existed, but only for a user’s own video uploads. Now, every video can potentially be shared either via the app, or via its video webpage. As for embedding, it was only available until now via some third-party tools.

In the app, click the ellipse button (…) in the lower right of any video to bring up the new “Share this post” option. From there, videos can be embedded or shared on Twitter or Facebook.

What About Video Privacy?

The sharing and embedding options that are available to others are dependent on how the video creator has elected to share the video.

• If the video hasn’t been shared outside of Vine by its creator, other users won’t be able to share or embed the video.
• If the creator shares the video outside of Vine, the embed button will be available to anyone, but social sharing will be limited to using the same platform that the video creator has used.

In other words, my recent sunset Vine video has an Embed button and a Twitter sharing button at the bottom of the page because I shared the video on Twitter. It has no Facebook button because I didn’t share it on Facebook.

This is a small update, but it should help give Vine videos more visibility outside of the app and Twitter. That’s an important step as Vine aims to increase both awareness and adoption.

Vine is still missing some other important things, like giving each user a profile/home page (as Instagram finally did in November). Vine is also missing something even more important: an Android version of its app. A company spokesperson tells us there’s nothing to share on that front.