How to Post GIFs on Facebook Statuses – and Pages too!
by Mike Opera •
Well, the day is finally here. GIFs are available to the world of Facebook. Facebook has claimed in the past that adding GIFs to the News Feed would make it too noisey for users. But that appears to have changed, and why not? Auto-playing videos have been out for quite sometime and adding GIFs are just another effort to liven up the News Feed.
How to add a GIF to your Facebook post
From the user’s perspective, adding a GIF is extremely simple. Just copy the URL of the GIF being hosted on another website (you cannot directly upload a GIF and have it work through Facebook.)
BOOM! Just add a caption and post to have all of your friends see your GIF (keep in mind you can delete the URL of the GIF once the image has loaded, it won’t delete the GIF itself.)
But wait… there’s more
Tons of articles are surfacing the web that talk about the best GIFS to post on Facebook right now. You’ll also read that GIFs aren’t yet available for Facebook pages and are only available to users. But this isn’t necessarily the case. There’s a little loophole Facebook marketers can use to post Facebook GIFs on pages. Let’s talk about the GIFV and how this can be used in an engaging social content marketing strategy.
The GIFV extension was introduced for multiple reasons, one of them to be optimized for social channel use. If you post a GIFV that your audience really enjoys this can be a great play for you to spark some great engagement and increase your overall Facebook organic reach (just please don’t post them too often). Uploading a GIFV for a Facebook page is not nearly as easy as it is to upload a GIF as a normal Facebook user, but shouldn’t require anymore time than whipping up an image quote or so. You’re going to need to find a host that is compatible with GIFV, our Social Media Content Director Emily likes to use IMGUR so we will use their interface for this example.
Signing up for IMGUR is extremely easy and shouldn’t take up more than 5 minutes or so.
Once you’ve signed up and have your image in mind, click upload image.
From there, you’ll have multiple options to upload your image. Choose whatever works for you.
And once you’ve done that you should see this:
See the orange circle? This is the Title and Description of your GIF. This will hover directly over your image on Facebook, so make sure to add a title and description otherwise it will say IMGUR all over your GIFV you plan to post. See the red circle? That’s your GIFV file that will easily embed into your Facebook Page. Just copy and paste that into your page and you’ll be good to go. Make sure to hit the big green publish button to make sure this properly shows on Facebook. Once you’ve published, you also have the option to share through your Facebook page directly through IMGUR.
If you’ve followed these instructions you should see this:
So how can you use this in an engaging social content strategy? Find out what your audience likes and occasionally throw a relevant GIFV in here or there. If you don’t know what your fan base likes – use the Facebook Graph Search tool for movies, books, etc. that you could potentially find a GIF of then convert it to a GIFV.
One drawback that we want to note is that when the GIF is clicked on, the user will be directed to the IMGUR page on which the GIF lives. This isn’t ideal, but if it’s post engagement you’re after this workaround will suit your needs.
If you’re not familiar with the Facebook Graph search tool, check it out. We’re in sunny San Diego at Power Digital and it’s not a huge surprise a great deal of our fans like the movie Anchorman. Maybe an Anchorman GIFV will crack some likes for us. There a bunch of different combinations you can use to gain insights about your audience. If you don’t think your Facebook following is big enough to gain enough to gain accurate insights, then consider asking them what their favorite movies, books, television shows, etc. are and occasionally throw a GIFV to spark engagement down the line.
What are your thoughts on GIFS being allowed on Facebook? Do you see this as making your News Feed too spammy? Or do you see this being a fun refreshing spin on Facebook?
