In the following year, over million GIFs were shared across Twitter alone. Brands who share authentic and engaging content can create a close relationship with their audience, and the right GIF can be the perfect way to make this connection.
The average file is seconds in length, which makes them perfect for grabbing the eight-seconds of attention you are given, as your followers scroll through their social feeds. How else can they add value to your business? GIFs can add more context or emotion in a much shorter message. These animated wonders bring a dose of youthful entertainment to your timeline. Show off your products. The animation allows for a great opportunity to highlight a key function or feature of your product.
Gamify your posts. One way to use GIFs to increase your social media engagement is through gamification. Provide visual instructions. If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many is a GIF worth? Since they loop forever, your audience can watch as many times as they need to fully understand. Go viral with relatable content. GIFs are easy to relate to, which also translates to shareability on social media.
Every social network now makes visual content very large in the news feed, so people are more likely to notice your content and in-turn share it. Animate your data. This is an awesome way to depict your data in a much more digestible form. Make use of GIFs to add some color and motion to normally-dull statistics. But the GIF format has a special feature—it can also be used to create animated images like the one below. CompuServe published the GIF format in , and it was last updated in It helped to define early GeoCities websites, MySpace pages, and email chains remember the dancing baby?
In fact, the GIF format may be more popular now than ever before. Honestly, GIF is a terribly outdated format. People have tried to replace the GIF format. They always fail. They can have sound, they can use more than colors, and they use up less hard drive space than bulky old GIFs. Using GIFs is a bit like using emojis. In fact, the keyboard on your phone probably has a GIF function built right in.
But what if you want to save GIFs on your phone or computer? It may even let you add text and effects if you feel so inclined. We suggest using a GIF-making website to avoid any headaches or disappointment. You could lose track of your GIF forever! Getting up to speed on internet culture?
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Browse All Privacy and Security Articles Browse All Linux Articles Browse All Buying Guides. By , all of the existing patents on licensing for the GIF had expired, and the format essentially entered the public domain.
The combination of fewer legal restrictions on the GIF and a broader, smartphone-boosted demand for a simple, quick, and more lightweight substitute for Flash animation brought the GIF back in a major way. GIF editing was becoming more advanced thanks to the growing accessibility of editing software like Photoshop, and people were beginning to convert video into GIF formats in order to quickly present video images. Meanwhile, the advent of YouTube in had begun to spur the confluence of meme culture with emerging vlogger culture and celebrity culture, and the GIF was there to capture it all.
And then came the onset of social media, and lo, GIFs were everywhere. Reddit, Twitter, and Tumblr launched in , , and respectively, and each of them played major roles in shifting the culture of social media toward the use of GIFs — especially the image-friendly Tumblr, where GIFs could be uploaded in sets of up to 10 images at once. On Tumblr, GIF sets were frequently elaborate, and people used them to tell stories or encapsulate and circulate current news. Historically, the animated GIF could be a static image or series of static images looped continuously, looped only once, or looped as many or as few times as the user desired.
There are even services that automate the process, allowing GIFs to be more portable and versatile as they travel the web.
Another crucial aspect of the modern GIF is its nature as a quick, all-purpose form of expression. Meanwhile, innumerable smartphone apps support the sending of GIFs through texts.
Finally, the modern era of GIFs has also seen the emergence of GIF artists — particularly on Tumblr, where people have made inroads in animated art while forming a complex and unique community. In , Tumblr chose GIF artist and game designer Roger Von Biersborn as its first artist in residence, inviting him to create original art for the site.
At the same time, more retro movements like the Glitch and Vaporwave art movements combine the GIF with the classic pixelation of the early internet to create a unique kind of magic.
But as the internet has evolved, the GIF has shown a surprising ability to evolve with it. So where will the GIF take us from here?
History would suggest that the future of the GIF will depend on how the internet itself evolves. But the GIF would seem to be here to stay.
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