How to Easily Animate Your Next Facebook Post

Posted: 01 Jun 2015 08:11 AM PDT

Yes! You can now liven up your Facebook posts with some GIF animations and I’ll show you a few ideas below.

When the announcement came a few days ago, it seemed as though the Internet collectively shouted…

FINALLY!

And of course, there are also those who are cringing because they fear a more cluttered newsfeed.

Nevertheless, now you can share images like the one below…

With so many other social networks already supporting animated GIFs, Facebook is finally catching up.

To post the animation to your page, you have to grab the URL of the file and paste it into your status update box. You cannot use the Upload Image feature as of yet.

Have you tested it yet? It’s working on my page, but others have reported no luck yet. It seems to be rolling out in waves. So if you don’t see it yet sit tight…. it’s coming your way.

You’ll be able to copy images from Giphy, Tumblr, etc. right into your feed and it works on the mobile app too.

Where to Make Animated GIFs From Your Own Images

You can go to sites like Picasion, Gickr, and EZGif.com just to name a few. And no doubt there will be plenty of Facebook apps coming to a mobile device near you.

I took two photos from ThinkStock, uploaded them to Picasion and this was the result. Took me all of 2 seconds…

You could take a few different poses of yourself and upload your thoughts along with it to make your comment more interesting.

The possibilities are endless and this can be great for promotion. Let’s say you’re having a sale on a product and want to create a banner with an animated call to action.

How to Create an Animated Promo

Just create two or more images using the image editor of your choice. To create a “flashing text effect” just add the text to one image and leave it off the other.

Upload both to Picasion and copy the the link to the GIF. Here’s an example…

You could also do something like this…

Use the same technique to create animated text…

Picasion even lets you choose the speed of the animation.

Notice two of my examples have kids. That wasn’t a coincidence. People love cats, dogs and babies. So use them when you can!

The Pros and Cons

Animation will no doubt make everyone’s feed more entertaining, and get ready to see some creativity in action if you haven’t already.

However, just like anything else animation can be overused, and people can become immune to them. I can see some people uploading random dancing objects just because they can.

Nevertheless, I’m looking forward to seeing how creative people get.

How Animated is Your FB Feed?

I’m not seeing too much animation in my feed as of yet. Either the people I follow are slow adopters, aren’t interested or don’t have the capability yet.

How ’bout you? Will you be using this much?

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02/06/2015