Visual designs have a strong influence on driving user engagement across social media platforms. GIFs are the latest addition to the spectrum of visual elements on social media including images, videos, infographics, etc. Giants such as Google and Twitter frequently use GIFs as an interactive medium to communicate with their target audience. GIFs now prominently feature in UX design services provided by social media and digital marketing agencies to improve brand awareness. Social media platforms are expecting to entertain around 2.7 billion active users* in 2019. With such a massive potential market, multiple industry businesses are cashing in on GIFs for maximum user engagement.
This blog post highlights how businesses can use GIFs to market their products on social media in an effective manner.
What is a GIF?
A GIF or Graphic Interchange Format is a lossless image file format invented by Steve Wilhite, a computer scientist, in 1987. GIFs are crisp, soundless, and subject-specific video messages running in a loop.
GIFs can be created by amalgamating animations, static images, and textual information. A standard GIF image can have a maximum of 256 colors.
How GIF is Different from other file formats?
There are three image formats that are constantly used on the internet, i.e. GIF, PNG, and JPEG. The major difference between them is the GIF support animation, i.e. they are small animated files. Similar to other image formats, GIFs can be added as a visual element in web design services for websites and mobile applications.
However, GIFs do require a good internet connection to load. Slow internet connection poses a challenge for GIFs to convey the intended message to its users.
Use of GIFs in UX Design Services for Social Media Platforms
Although Facebook doesn’t allow you to post GIFs directly as a message, it does allow you to post links to your web pages which contains GIFs. The URL link to websites, blogs, or Giphy site must end with (.gif) to make it look animated when posted.
In addition, Facebook has separate guidelines for adding GIFS in the advertisement campaign for your business. GIFs can be used as ads on Facebook, Instagram and Audience Network. According to Facebook’s GIF standards, the file size requirement for GIFs remains same as that of the images, i.e. 4GB. If you don’t have a link to a GIF already, you can use a GIF website such as GIPHY in your Fb’s Ads Manager.
Back in 2015, people shared over 100 million GIFs on Twitter. People can directly Tweet GIFs or send them as direct messages or comments to the posts. Animated GIFs on Twitter can be up to 5MB when uploaded from mobile, and up to 15MB from the web. Hence, both web and mobile app design services can include GIFs to create brand awareness via Twitter.
In fact, in 2016, Twitter launched a dedicated GIF library to let people shoot GIFs as tweets and messages. You can now search for specific GIFs by putting in the keyword and share it across devices via Twitter.
Further, businesses can increase their brand awareness in a lively and effective manner through Twitter Ads. Brands can use basic slide shows of static images, text-based GIFs, or educational GIFs to connect with their audience creatively.
You may also like to read- Ensuring Brand Recall with Website Logo Placement
Conclusion
GIFs are an essential tool for brands to connect with millennials. They are easy to interpret, share, and build. Therefore, along with intuitive web interfaces, businesses must also include impressive GIFs in their checklist to avail UX research and design services.
Oodles Studio provides UX Design Services for websites, mobile sites, and mobile application. Talk to our digital design team for building engaging and user-centric web interfaces for your business.
*Study Source- https://www.statista.com/statistics/278414/number-of-worldwide-social-network-users/
Image Source- Google
