What’s an animated GIF?
Animated GIFs (pronounced “jifs” by some, but “gifs” by most) are essentially a digital flip book. Flicking through the pages of the book produces the impression of animation. Animated GIFs are a collection of images that play in a sequence within the same file, that too, create the impression of animation.
Common on Twitter, but arguably useful on other platforms (Facebook etc.), this is an engaging form of content media that can add a layer of movement and excitement to your post. Within Twitter, the process an animated GIF is simply tapping the “GIF” button within the Tweet compose window.
But for many of us, we use social media management tools, like Hootsuite, to schedule content ahead of time (so it can be published when our audience are ready – and it frees us up to be able to be doing something else). In this case, it isn’t terribly obviously how you can do this, but it’s not all that tricky.
Pop “/gif” (sans quote marks) into the compose window of Hootsuite, and you’ll get a nifty little search window similar to that on Twitter when tapping the button. Do your search in that field and you’ll have a great selection of engaging content you can add to your Tweet!
You can then post it live, or schedule for a later date – whichever is convenient. And it looks super awesome when posted to Twitter, every bit as good as doing it natively. I have quite the penchant for animated GIFs, for me they represent so much more than I able to represent in 140 characters of text, so I encourage you to check this out – see what you think.
Yay! Did you know you can add GIFs to messages in Hootsuite? pic.twitter.com/ZFF2TA6KmG
— James Lane (@JamesLaneMe) May 9, 2017
If you give it a go – tag us in so we can see! We’re @HypestarUK on Twitter.
