Soaring Worldwide’s James Brown discusses the new GIF feature made available on Twitter in the last week.
I love GIFs – I really do. Little nuggets of video (or moving images) to express your thoughts, opinions or feelings on a subject and Twitter has made a good move by making it a mainstream feature.
Within minutes of noticing I now had the ability to use GIFs on my tweets I was delving into the huge library at my disposal and it’s something Twitter users are going to have to get used to seeing on their timeline a lot over the coming months. GIFs are by no means a ‘new thing’ but the ease in which you can use them on tweets will no doubt see an increased use across the platform.
Now, naturally this isn’t going to be all about using a yawning cat GIF to show others how you feel about a Monday morning. What Twitter has done here is open up a whole new world of business opportunities too. The scope for advertisers to use GIFs on Twitter is endless and this is undoubtedly a shrewd business move. Take EURO 2016 later this year for example. Twitter has done great things in the past to maximise engagement and interaction during huge sporting tournaments. But now GIFs could give them yet another platform to allow advertisers to reach their target markets.
Expect companies to be demonstrating their products on Twitter using GIFs in the very near future…
The fact is that GIFs are big business. Giphy, for example, just one Twitter partner that offers GIF search and integrates already with platforms such as Facebook Messenger and Slack, is valued at $300 million.
However, the best thing about GIFs for me is that it can add a real personality to your tweets, be it personally or even on a business level. There are companies that already use GIFs incredibly well, one being Paddy Power who enjoy huge traffic because of this. Sometimes the best way to reach your audience is by embracing the use of new developments and I think GIFs do exactly that.
So, if you’re a Twitter user, then get onto your phone, tablet or computer and give it a go. I warn you now – you may spend too much time finding the right GIF for you, but you’ll have a lot of fun doing so!
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