Marketing trends are cyclical.

That applies to social media marketing as well as more “conventional” applications. Take Twitter, for example, who is getting rid of its 6-second video app, Vine, from its offerings (along with 9% of their staff).

Vine was conjured up in the minds of three entrepreneurs who were amazed at how quickly the challenge of pushing the envelope of creativity within 6-second video segments caught on.

Twitter bought Vine in 2012—with the attraction that the app would have access to Twitter’s already large user base, and that it fit the same “short, sweet, to the point messaging” as Twitter’s 140-character model.

The majority of people who utilize social media networks as a big part of their online experience are adventurous, tech-savvy Millennials who are always excited for the next best technology to be released (look at Apple’s following). And that is a huge reason that led to the demise of Vine—Snapchat and Instagram. These two video-centric apps evolved, keeping up with the pace of their users, whereas Vine did not. Six-second clips just were not cutting it anymore.

Snapchat offered 10-second videos that disappear after being viewed, then added filters, stickers and other effects to further improve the platform. Instagram offered even more for their users with the ability to film and post 3- to 60-second long videos and has kept up the pace by adding six new features in 2016 alone (including Instagram Stories, the rival to Snap Stories).

To try to keep up with the whirlwind pace of social media culture, early last year Twitter launched Periscope, a live streaming video app, pushing Vine even further to become nothing more than a 6-second memory in social media history. 

Now, apply this story to social media marketing. You need to be engaged, consistent and visible with your targeted audience across the social media networks they use most (which you can identify through research, persona development and analytics).

Moral of the story: perhaps, with luck, in the lightning fast social media trending culture, initially, “if you post it, they will come…” but if you don’t expand, grow and evolve with, and for your audience, you will die on the vine (pun intended).