(Yeah, it's embarrassing.) Whether or not that exact phenomenon happens to you, you can imagine that seeing a video - especially of a human face - can make people empathize or feel some sort of emotion. They can elicit emotions. Have you ever watched a movie or television show and found yourself mimicking the facial expression of someone on-screen? This happens to me all the time. Not only do users not have to open a new window to see the animation (this is huge), but also they're short in length, making them quick and easily consumable to your viewers. It's hard to capture people's attention nowadays, especially when they're scrolling through their Twitter feeds. Animated GIFs kind of look like images on Twitter, except users can be prompted to click on them because of the white 'play' button overlaying the image. A HubSpot A/B test found a 55% increase in leads when images were added to tweets.

You may already know that adding still images to tweets catches your followers' eyes in busy News Feeds and makes them more clickworthy. So why can animated GIFs be good for marketing on Twitter? I'm excited to see how they take advantage of Twitter's update. Have you ever seen Home Depot's Vine profile? They've been posting short animated videos on their Vine account for some time now with promotions, quick tips, and other campaigns - and people know them for it. Adding animated GIFs to tweets opens up a new world of content marketing opportunities on Twitter. How and why would I use them for marketing on Twitter?'įor many reasons, actually. You might be thinking to yourself, 'Animated GIFs are cute, but they're kind of silly. (As you can see in Twitter's example above, this means you should avoid a white background in your animated GIF.) Why Marketers Should Care The white 'play' button on the GIF indicates to users that it's animated, not just a still image. The GIF won't animate automatically in your News Feed, but all users have to do is click on the GIF for it to play right in the feed - no new window has to be opened up.

Starting today, you can share and view animated GIFs on, Android and iPhone. The announcement was made in a tweet from Twitter's Support team - and, appropriately, it included an animated GIF.

Download twitter gif as gif