GIFs are now a huge part of social media. Social media users are now 9 times more likely to search for a GIF in 2016, than they were in 2012.

A GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) was introduced back in 1987 and was one of the first image formats commonly used on the World Wide Web. Since the introduction of smartphones, the use of GIFs have increased and are now a popular form of digital expression on visual networking sites like Tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest and Facebook.

GIF’s can be used on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+ and LinkedIn.

GIF’s can be used to achieve a variety of outcomes. You might want to show your personality online through a humorous GIF, or to show off your latest product rather than creating a full length video. You could also use a GIF to tell a story through a presentation, to animate data or visualise a special discount or competition you are running. Regardless of your desired outcome, a GIF can be difficult to create. I am here to make your life a WHOLE lot easier by sharing with you a tool that allows you to record GIF’s from your desktop. This tool is called Giphy Capture.

Giphy Capture allows you to record anything on your MAC, and turn it into a high definition GIF completely free of charge. If you are watching a video on the internet and find a “GIF worthy moment”, all you have to do is use the app to capture the area and start recording!

Whilst the tool was primarily a smartphone based app, they have now released a MAC version. Once the tool is installed on your mac, you can (as mentioned above) record, resize and capture any area, as well as add captions.

Giphy Capture describe their tool as “Capture instantly, edit precisely, quickly save & share, and simple upload to Giphy.”

Why Should YOU Use GIFs?

A Social Media Favourite

Whilst a GIF is not suitable for all types of content, they do receive a lot of love on social media. Twitter introduced a new feature called the “GIF Keyboard” which is a way of searching for a GIF, where you can then attach it to a tweet and share with your community. Twitter celebrated this on the 3rd March, using the hashtag #GIFparty to encourage businesses to send their favourite GIF using the new GIF Keyboard. We saw the likes of Dominoes, Game of Thrones, Coca Cola, NASA and even Twitter themselves getting involved in the fun.

If this isn’t enough to convince you that GIF’s are a great form of visual content then I don’t know what is.

Impactable Data

BuzzFeed have been great in telling a story through the use of GIFs and have proved how much of an impact it has made when using a quick, visual piece of content to get information across. GIF’s do make an impact as they are short, and snappy pieces of data.

Promotional Tool

As a business, you need to think of a GIF as a promotional tool. A PR company called Roland Dransfield created a GIF for a competition to get people guessing Manchester landmarks beginning with the letter of the alphabet which was revealed each day on Twitter. They then used the images at the end of the competition to reveal a winner. The GIF received over 1,000 impressions.

Have you been using GIF’s as a way of sharing content online?