Instagram 101: Instagram GIF Stickers

Instagram introduced stickers to give its users a fun and unique way to express themselves when sharing Stories. One of the most fun (and customisable!) sticker options is the GIF. As a brand or artist, you can even create your own! Let us give you a quick rundown on what exactly Instagram GIF Stickers are and why you should use them as part of your social strategy:

What are they?

A library full of thousands of moving stickers, powered by GIPHY, on Instagram.

Why use them?

They ‘lift’ your Instagram Story content, helping make it more funny, interesting or creative. They also:

• Drive brand awareness

• Draw attention to important elements of your Story, e.g. ‘Swipe Up’ button

• Establish brand consistency

• Encourage people to post from live event

How do you create your own?

If you have the skills yourself, you could create your own GIFs through Adobe After Effects and Photoshop. However, if that’s not your bag, you could always get in touch with a social agency such as ourselves or use your in-house design team.

The process of getting the GIFs live on Instagram goes as follows:

• Brief and design the GIFs

• Create an account with GIPHY

• Upload your branded GIFs to GIPHY

• Assign keywords (searchable on Instagram)

• Apply for a GIPHY brand channel and verification for your GIFs to pull through to Instagram (this can take up to 2 weeks)

How will you spread the word about your new Stickers

Promotion of your new assets is essential as how will anyone know they’re there to be used unless you tell them? Ways which you could share your exciting new feature would be:

• Share on your Stories and demonstrate how your audience can find them

• Work with an influencer who could spread the message wider than just your audience

• Use cross-channel promotion and share a post on your social networks that you now have GIFs over on Instagram

How do you measure success?

Brand accounts on GIPHY come with an analytics dashboard with stats on performance of each of the GIFs you create, e.g. GIF views. Perfect to see which of your GIFs resonate most with your audience and which they don’t love so much! This can influence what kind of GIFs you create for the future and give you great added stats for campaigns.

Who has done it well?

To shout out a fellow Glasgow biz, NAF! Salon have done a great job using Instagram GIF Stickers. The kooky nail salon has the ideal client base for the platform, and they know their audience will eat stuff like this up, so they gave them what they wanted! They have GIFs ranging from days of the week, names of the nail technicians and sassy quotes for people to share on their #nafselfie that no doubt comes right after they leave the salon.

In terms of promotion of the GIFs, they have a Highlight saved on their profile that showcases how to use them and every time they upload a new set of GIFs, they can announce the news on their Story and add to their Highlight, so everyone is kept in the loop.

Will you be venturing into Instagram GIF Stickers anytime soon? If brand awareness is something you’re looking to concentrate on, they’re well worth a try! Drop us a line if there’s any more information you’d like on the subject.