59% of marketing professionals find blogging valuable and a huge part of the reason why is that blogs can generate an average of 67% more leads monthly for companies that blog than those that don’t.
Business blogs provide readers an informative guide that often helps businesses lead them to patronize the different products and services that the companies offer. Subsequently, business blogs contain heavy pieces of information that may not look appealing to readers. Sometimes, blogs can look too congested with information and become less engaging for that reason.
As a result, bloggers turn to graphics that help add beauty to a post or present data in an organized and engaging way.
One of the types of images that are now popularly used is the Graphics Interchange Format (GIF).
Bloggers get to entice readers to read a certain content more with the use of GIFs that is effective in the visualization of the different pieces of information conveyed.
Are you currently using GIFs?
If you are still wondering how GIFs benefit bloggers, get to know the uses of GIFs, ways of finding one, or creating your own.
Uses of Gifs for Your Blog Content
GIFs for blogging are widely used nowadays to ensure that there is an easy understanding of the different pieces of information you are going to discern.
By adding GIFs to your blog posts, you can make your content look more dynamic and engaging. Aside from the typical JPEG format shown on your blog posts, you can use GIFs to capture attention and maintain the interest of your readers.
Here are the specific uses of GIFs for your blog content.
Highlight a Brand Personality
GIFs help brands represented by business blogs to be humanized and shown in an authentic way.
As a brand, you want to be presented as innovative and forward-thinking. Through enticing GIFs for blogging highlighted in every business article, you can leave a lasting impression on your readers about your unique personality.
To do this, make sure that you have a unified color palette and style in every GIF as you would in your other graphics.
While other bloggers do not pay much attention to GIFs, your blog will be easily distinguished for caring about the littlest detail.
Show a Product Better
Aside from the plain JPEG formats, GIFs for blogging can show your product even better.
There are certain details and features of a product that cannot be seen in a plain JPEG format. Through GIFs used for blogging, you can add several details that ought to be highlighted when presenting products.
Since GIFs are graphical elements in motion, the features of a product that would normally be hidden can be shown better without having to create a video.
Explain the Process
Readers typically get bored with the plain JPEG procedure on the different how-to procedural blogs.
Through GIFs for blogging, readers get to see all the procedures in one place only. Minimizing the further scrolling of the readers in navigating a certain business blog, readers get to easily visualize content through a GIF format.
In addition, readers get to easily track the outcome of every movement done in a certain procedure.
Send a Message
Different business articles can also interact through GIFs.
One of the ways this can be done is by coming up with a GIF idea that showcases appreciation among other forms of messages the blog wishes to convey.
Thanking a reader becomes even more personal with GIFs. When readers receive interactive images of your message, it elevates the experience for them.
Make use of creative and fluid emoticons and stickers on top of moving texts alongside dynamic designs.
Tell a Story
Readers on the average page will only read about 20% of the text. Often, your readers will skip a large portion of your content especially if it is too wordy.
Adding images may enhance the content, but putting more of those discourages the reader to go deeper with your content.
By collating all images in a GIF format, you can narrate a story and visualize the content in a neat way.
Animate Data
Showing images or infographics is convenient for the readers but using GIFs instead can help more.
GIFs can display information or tends as an animated diagram or graphic of certain data leading people to easily see the implication of a certain data shown with the movement highlighted.
As a blogger, considering the use of GIFs for blogging, you can achieve your goal of leaving your readers more informed than they were before checking out your blog.
Play an Ad
By giving audiences teasers of your other products and services, showing an ad in GIF form will ensure that readers get to see other product offerings available in your company.
Other than video ads, GIF offers an affordable option for bloggers to display content as this just comprises images animated in one place.
Many readers nowadays prefer ads that are in GIF extensions compared to MP4 formats because there is no sound produced that will distract readers while going over your content.
Show a Sneak Peek
Let the readers look at some upcoming releases or announcements from your business using GIFs.
Using a GIF gives you an opportunity to promote teasers in a sophisticated way.
You can show some snippets of the things needed to be highlighted in a certain business blog.
How to Find GIFs
Looking for GIFs that you can use is not at all difficult. There are many platforms that allow GIFs.
In this section, you will get to know some platforms you can use to find creative and interactive GIFs.
To find GIFs for blogging on Facebook, you can make use of GIPHY for Facebook or Facebook GIFs.
You may look for different GIF animations that you can utilize in your respective blog topic and you will certainly find plenty of them.
Try to create a new post, and then click the options tab and select the GIF button. After such, there is a search bar where you can type the topic you desire to discuss and highlight a certain GIF animation that is relevant to your blog post.
Searching for a wide array of GIF animations for blogging, Google offers a promising opportunity for bloggers to navigate and use animations. To do this, you can use the images tab and filter the images using the “Settings” tab and click “Animated” images.
And there you have it, you can now search with the different animated images that you can use in your respective business blog.
Using the Boomerang for the Instagram app, you can use photo snippets and add them with animated elements. Instantly, you have your own GIF.
To make sure that you use highly interactive GIFs in your business blog using Instagram, you can select a photo or video that best represents your message, and then tap the “Sticker” icon and select “GIF.”
Or, simply search for the topic you desire on what GIF you ought to use.
Use GIPHY and Tenor for Twitter and you can find a suitable GIF to use for your specific content.
Try to compose a tweet then click the “Add a GIF” icon, and select which topic you desire and will be relevant to your business blog.
How to Create GIFs
Locating for GIFs that will accompany your blog is good, but creating your own GIF is better as this assures authentic and further interaction among your readers.
For beginners in creating GIFs for blogging, here are some of the recommended tools by Digital Trends:
- GIFS.com
- GIF Maker by Giphy
- Screen To GIF
- RecordIT
- Ezgif.com
- GIF Toaster
- GIF Me
- Video to GIF – GIF Maker
To make sure that you effectively craft GIFs, here are some of the ways that you can do with the GIPHY Capture tool.
Launch a Screen-Recording GIF Software
GIPHY Capture gives you a tool where you get to record the image. Like taking a screenshot, the software will give you a guide on what areas should you consider in crafting a GIF.
Locate the Area Where You Want to Record
Still using the same software, you can enlarge the area where you want to consider a certain image for GIF.
You can drag the corners and click the bottom-right corner to see the size of a certain image to be used as a GIF.
Customize GIF Settings
After locating the area where you want to record an image for GIF, you can click the circular red button and press it again should you want to stop the recording.
The next procedure that you should do is to customize your GIF especially in its loop type, pixel size, frame rate, and caption text.
Note: Bookmark this post as we will continually update it with more choices for a software that you can use to create GIFs.
