CAMBRIDGE, MA: Microvideo offers marketers a significant opportunity to build an emotional connection with consumers who are more likely to engage with such short-form material on channels like Instagram and Vine, according to new research.

In Connect With The Power Of Microvideo, a brief for marketing leadership professionals, Forrester Research drew attention to its finding that only 0.22% of top brands' Facebook fans interact with each of these brands' posts (and a mere 0.03% on Twitter), compared with 2.26% of Instagram fans who interact with posts.

"Marketers who prioritise investments in Facebook and Twitter's over-fished waters are missing a big opportunity to engage with customers," it said.

Microvideo is a prime test-and-learn candidate, it suggested, with audiences shown to respond to impromptu videos created with smartphones, so making costs within this channel relatively low.

Hard facts came from food outlet Dunkin' Donuts, which used Vine to recreate key plays from Monday Night Football with its "coffee cup game" microvideos. These replays created an emotional connection and made the brand part of the Monday Night Football dialogue on social media for the first time.

Results included an estimated $836,000 in additional media, 70.7m-plus impressions and a tweet engagement between 8% and 10% higher than Twitter's average.

Last month Twitter opened up another route for advertisers to explore the use of Vine when it bought Niche, a start-up that operates as a middleman between social media influencers and brands.

Forbes described it as "a backdoor way of advertising that has caught on across multiple new platforms" and highlighted a recent effort by Hewlett Packard. This saw a number of Vine stars adding their "signature antics" to their interactions with an HP touchscreen laptop, which subsequently developed into a TV ad.

"It's just a hint of what could become more and more frequent," Forbes concluded.

Vine stars are reported to be earning as much as $18,000 a time to "have a bit of fun" with a product in a six-second clip.

Data sourced from Forrester Research, Forbes, BBC; additional content by Warc staff