Inside Ford’s approach to Vine

Instead of posting it from Ford’s own account, Ford re-Vined the creation from Mancuso’s handle. That post received 81,700 likes, 37,600 re-Vines and over 1,500 comments, though on the influencer’s account, not Ford’s. Big brands typically don’t re-Vine other users, opting instead to post them directly under their own handle. For example, Toyota’s Vine account often includes characters from the Muppets in its Vine videos while showcasing their cars. Yet the car company does not appear to use influencers or re-Vine from other accounts. Volkswagen USA seems to be documenting its events, but everything comes directly from the Volkswagen handle. 

In fact, many of the Ford influencer posts do extremely well — when posted from the influencer account. This Vine by Jerome Jarre received 295,900 likes, 186,800 re-Vines and nearly 5,000 comments.  

Posts Vined under the Ford handle generally get a fraction of that engagement. Here’s one by Ian Padgham that received 241 likes, 89 re-Vines and 10 comments in total.

Untereker said, “We ensured that Ford was simply a part of the influencer’s world, instead of asking them to create an ad about Ford.”

Each of the Vines features a Ford car, making it feel more like a product placement than an outright ad for Ford. Ford has only recently begun to place Vines on Twitter, though they haven’t gone over quite as well in the text-heavy platform. A Vine by Rudy Mancuso posted to Twitter received only 23 retweets and 18 favorites, in contrast to other non-Vine tweets by Ford, which received between 37 and 97 retweets, and 37 and 52 favorites.