From the course: Social Media Video Strategy: Weekly Bites

Creating animated GIFs - Premiere Pro Tutorial

From the course: Social Media Video Strategy: Weekly Bites

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Creating animated GIFs

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- One social media asset that's definitely making a comeback is the animated GIF. Not only are they one of the most widely shared types of content on social, they're also extremely popular in email and chat programs. Certainly, much of their appeal is often their humor and wit, but really, it comes down to very quickly and effectively conveying a message and tone to your audience. And because many animated GIFs are combined with text to create memes, this elevates the messaging even more. As people scroll through their news feeds, the motion of an animated GIF captures their attention and the emotion is quickly conveyed. Their looping property is great for short attention spans and their creative potential can be a perfect way to humanize a brand and connect with target audiences. They can also be used practically to quickly explain simple visual concepts. If you'd like to incorporate animated GIFs into your branding strategy, you should first take stock in a few things. To begin with, define your message. What do you want to say? Who do you want to say it to? What tone do you want to convey? What other social assets will it accompany to complete your brand messaging? When you've got that worked out, you need to isolate the perfect few moments of visuals to communicate your message and capture your audience's attention. You can certainly use already existing GIFs and take advantage of the vast library of available assets. You can use existing text or you can add your own. Lots of brands do this very effectively to spark engagement in their social media strategy. Or you can make your own GIFs. They can be created from a few moments of video or a screen capture or a burst of still photos or recorded footage from your webcam. If you're creating GIFs from existing video, most major video editing software programs can get the job done. You just need to choose several seconds of footage, add the appropriate text, filters, or effects, and then export the video as an animated GIF. Then when you share it, it loops, and you've got your homemade gift. You can do much the same thing with a collection of still images using graphics programs like Photoshop. You can also turn to any number of animated GIF creation tools. One popular app is Giphy which allows you to create the GIF using existing video or a series of static images. From there, it's easy to add and style your captions, attach stickers, add filters, and more. Then, you can easily share it with a wide variety of social channels. Here are some other animated GIF creation tools that you might also want to try. Here's an animated GIF that I created using existing video. And here's one I made using still images. As you can see, there really are countless uses for animated GIFs, so if your brand strategy could use a burst of engagement, the animated GIF could be a perfect addition to your social media arsenal.

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