Ever since Twitter and Facebook began to support animated gifs, the future of social media marketing will be just that: animated.
Using images on social media has always proven a powerful way to promote brands and boost engagement. Indeed, a social media strategy without visual marketing will never be effective. But just as social media platforms evolve to support more image and other multimedia formats, your social media strategy needs to follow suit. Animated gifs are no exception.
Many brands have already found success in using gifs on Twitter, including Wendys, Samsung and Bud Light.
What is an animated gif?
Gifs are an image extension, .gif, for animated image files. Many people debate over the pronunciation, but gifs experts pronounce it with a hard G.
Despite the debate over the pronunciation, animated gifs like this one are going to be an important tool in the future of social media marketing.
Why businesses use gifs
Gifs make your brand more relatable because they allow businesses to “show off their sense of humor and personality,” and all users to express themselves and “relate with others in a fun way.” They play on a loop, so they quickly catch the viewer’s eye as they scroll through a newsfeed.
Gif experts at GIFHY provided Hootsuit the following three tips for businesses who plan to use gifs as they advance into the future of social media marketing:
Use gifs in the appropriate context
Like anything posted on social media, gifs need the right context.
Achieving this doesn’t simply require attaching the right keywords to the gif. Gifs are often snippets of a movie, TV show, or other clip from popular culture, so you have to understand the source of the gif. Otherwise, you risk posting a gif that, given its pop culture source, doesn’t mean what you thought it meant.
Don’t be too casual
If you don’t use gifs from popular clips or TV shows, then there really is no point of them–the audience won’t find it appealing or entertaining. However, there is a limit. As a GIFHY team member said, “when a brand gets too meme-y or ‘hip with the kids,’ it’s time to get off the internet.”
When using gifs in your social media marketing strategy, avoid being too casual, or to “hip with the kids”–otherwise, you risk making your brand look as cool as these “SNL” actors wearing “mom jeans.”
Avoid overly branded content
If you’re already educated on the role of gifs in the future of social media marketing and perhaps decide to make your own gifs, the GIFHY team offers one piece of advice: keep the gif simple. Don’t drown it in logos.
Now, go out there and gif your social media marketing strategy some animated pizazz.
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