- Jun 16, 2020
- 3 min read

Getting GIPHY with it

Sarah is a big fan of GIFs and Stickers. This is why you should be too.

GIFs have come a long way since their humble beginnings back in 1987 – at one time banished only to the depths of tumblr blogs and Reddit forums, GIFs have made the biggest comeback since Michael Jordan in ‘95. The millennial’s meme format of choice, GIFs are the poster child of effort-free Internet messaging, in which Patrick Stewart facepalming can say more than words ever could – it’s no wonder the Oxford Dictionary named ‘GIF’ their word of the year in 2012.

The widespread success of GIFs on social media can be attributed to one website in particular, GIPHY. The forgotten child of social, GIPHY is in fact one of the most visited websites in the world (currently #521), dedicated to finding the perfect animated response to any tweet or Whatsapp. It’s no wonder that it captured the eye of Facebook who purchased the website and its 700m users earlier this year for $400m (although with some scrutiny from the regulators).

Contrary to what you may think, GIPHY isn’t all cat GIFs and celebs (although there are plenty of them on there) – in fact, it has some great marketing benefits for brands. We’ve been using GIPHY for some of our clients for a year or so now, and have been excited by some of the results we’ve seen. So, we’ve answered some of the key questions about the platform below.

What can brands use GIPHY for?

There are 3 key reasons why brands might use GIPHY:

Content: Social channels like Twitter and Facebook use GIPHY within their inbuilt keyboards – so if you go to send a tweet and select GIF, this searches GIPHY’s database and finds the perfect one. We’ve done this for our client, Toby Carvery, sharing its huge Yorkies, crispy roasties and slow-cooked meats when people are searching for roast dinner terms. It put their content (and food) in front of 2.1m people in less than a year.

350k views on this delicious roast for Toby Carvery

Stickers: You know those cute little GIFs that pop up when you search on Instagram stories? They’re called stickers, and Instagram runs them through GIPHY’s search engine. This means if you upload stickers to your account, both your brand AND consumers can use branded GIFs on their stories. It’s a nice extra touch for your marketing when you’re using the app’s core functionality to add some movement to your branding – we’ve recently seen over 2000 views on an Instagram story sticker we uploaded 7 days ago, and haven’t yet used ourselves.

Zopa branded sticker – 250k views in 3 months

How many views will I get on GIPHY?

Erm – a lot. With no media budget spent promoting GIF use or content using the GIFs, we’ve seen incredible results. For our client Zopa, we’ve had over 3m views on branded content over the course of a 6 month period. That’s a lot of eyeballs with very little investment needed.

What else do I need to know?

Branding: branded GIFs aren’t really what people are looking for most of the time, so if you want your logo in every GIF, you may not see the results you’re expecting. The key is to ensure that your GIFs are still recognisable as your brand, whether that’s reflecting colour, font or devices, BUT that they’re commonly useable by consumers and your brand alike
Verified account: To get your GIFs onto Instagram stories, you’ll need to apply for a branded account and get it verified. GIPHY warn that this can take quite a long time (c. 4 weeks), but in our experience this has happened within a few days of application
Stats are lacking: Unfortunately, you’re not going to get the same kind of analysis on your content as you do on Facebook, right now. You get view counts and most popular uploads, but that’s about it
You’ll lose hours: Seriously. Hours. So many GIFs to watch.