If your social media content is generally light-hearted, animated GIFs are a perfect complement to your other content. Also, because animated GIFs are shorter than videos, there’s a much greater chance that users will actually watch until the end.īeyond increasing engagement, animated GIFs are an effective way to demonstrate your brand’s personality, convey a brief message, or even evoke a smile. In fact, reported metrics claim that tweets with animated GIFs get 167 percent more click-throughs than tweets with static images, and the engagement rate for a post with a GIF increases 20 percent for B2C brands. The extra second or two of attention is often enough to drive a click to a page, post, or article.Īnimated GIFs are far more engaging (and often more entertaining) than static images. The simple fact is when users are rapidly scrolling through long lists of tweets, animated GIFs stand out and tend to catch the user’s eye. Why should I use animated GIFs on Twitter?Īnimated GIFs work great on Twitter because they are an excellent way to get noticed among Twitter’s endless streams of content. So there’s no mystery as to why animated GIFs are widely used today. Their short, looping nature is the perfect fit for today’s consumers with brief attention spans.Ĭombine these benefits with the fact that visual content is 40 times more likely to be shared on social media than other types of content.They are effortlessly shared across every social media channel.Their artistic potential is well suited to branding imagery.Their movement makes them eye-catching.However, over the past five years or so, animated GIFs made a major comeback and are now fully accepted in online marketing and social media. You can read more about the history of the animated GIF here. By the mid-to-late 1990s, most self-respecting designers, website builders, and marketers refused to use them. However, they quickly grew tiresome and were often considered primitive and cheesy. When the World Wide Web entered the public consciousness, the only way to show moving images in a web browser was to use animated GIFs.

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