How to get your own Gifs and Stickers on Social Media
Have you seen the little animated stickers used on Instagram and Facebook stories? Have you ever wondered how to get your own?
Here’s your quick guide on how you can have your own set of custom branded gifs for use in social media. Spoiler alert: It’s a lot easier than you think…
Why gifs are good
Having a set of gifs/stickers available on social media enables your brand to be showcased anywhere in the world. They are known as ‘stickers’ in Instagram and Facebook, and are used by millions of people every day to add flavour to their stories.
So how does it work? When one of your loyal customers share an Instagram story with your brand in it, they may decide to decorate the story with a sticker. They will search through a library of animated gifs until they find one that suits them, then share that post with all their followers. So what if you had your own brand assets available for them to use in their stories? Instead of using a generic gif, they could simply search for your brand name and grab one of your unique gifs to add to their story.
Your brand is then seen by all their contacts. Boom that’s free advertising!
How do you get your own branded gifs appearing on social media?
The biggest gif platform is a company named Giphy — they serve more than 10 billion gifs every day to social platforms such as Instagram and Facebook. If you want your brand to appear in Instagram or facebook search results, you need a verified Giphy account.
Gifs vs Stickers? Gifs and Stickers are much the same thing. Gifs are short animated images; stickers are a type of gif, but with transparency and are available in social media.
This ‘help me’ gif has had more than 13,000,000 views!
Hold up… How do you actually pronounce Gif?
Some favour the hard ‘G’ (as in gift), and others the soft ‘G’ (as in gym). And don’t get us started on the rebels who pronounce each letter independently. It’s fair to say this is an incendiary topic that has rustled many jimmies. We’ll leave the pronunciation decision to you and skip straight to answer the ‘how?’ question.
How to get verified on Giphy
The way to get your Gifs and stickers appearing in social media starts with Giphy. It’s easy to set up an account and (at the time of writing) free! The tricky step is getting verified. Each sticker you see on Instagram stories comes from a Giphy account that has been approved by the Giphy team. Unfortunately there is no guarantee that your account will get verified so it is important that you upload high-quality gifs, and meet all the Giphy criteria.
Here’s your step-by-step process to get started:
- Set up your Giphy account at https://giphy.com/join
- Pick your username and display name, insert your social media links, and write a sparkly blurb about your business.
- Upload gifs! To get verified you need to upload at least five gifs before you can apply. If you don’t have the five gifs to get started, we can help you with that. Scroll down to see how.
- Once you’ve uploaded those gifs then you can apply for verification at https://giphy.com/apply
- Now we wait. Verification is not guaranteed, nor is it a quick process—in some cases it can take months for approval. So cross those fingers and go enjoy life.
We can help you through each step if you need.
Quick Tip: Giphy like to see social media accounts that are active. Are you engaging with your followers and posting regularly? This will help you during the verification process. Take a look at some of Giphy’s tips on getting verified here.
