How To Make A GIF On Facebook: Update Adds Tool To The App's Built-in Camera

It may have taken Facebook a little time to join the GIF party but it has well and truly found its stride. As part of its recent update, a GIF option has been added to the app's built-in camera that lets you record your own three-second clips. The addition follows the full roll-out of the app's Facebook Camera, Effects, Stories and Direct tools in March. The feature was spotted by The Next Web and appears to only be available on the latest version of the iOS app. To record your own GIF on Facebook, open the app and tap on the camera in the top left corner of the Facebook app or by swiping right from News Feed. Along the top of the screen are three tabs: Normal, GIF and Text. Normal lets you take photos and record videos in the traditional way. Text creates the colourful text backgrounds seen littering news feeds, and GIF lets you record a three-second clip. All of the usual Snapchat-style features are then available to add, including frames, emoji, text and effects. You can then save the GIF to your phone's camera roll or upload it to your Facebook Story.

Once you've created a GIF, you can make it your profile picture. You can also turn any GIF online into a profile picture. To turn a static profile picture into a moving one go to your profile and click Edit in the bottom right-hand corner of your existing profile picture. From here you can either Take a New Profile Video, to record a new clip, or Select Profile Video. The latter will open your camera roll and your list of videos will appear. Select your video, trim it if appropriate and select Save. Facebook's foray into the world of GIFs is likely to have been driven by the success of GIFs on Facebook-owned WhatsApp. In November, WhatsApp added the option to send GIFs either saved on your phone, or via the built-in GIF search engine to individual friends and groups of people. The feature lets you edit GIFs on your phone with captions, stickers and drawings, trim a clip to the right length, and even convert your six-second videos into GIFs on the fly. Live Photos - the iPhone photographs that capture a couple of seconds of video before the image is snapped - can also be sent as GIFs.

This is where the real power of this tool lies! Hold Control and click both layers to select them. Click the little arrow in the upper right corner and select Tween. The more frames you add, the smoother the transition, and the bigger the animation. Click OK to see a whole set of new frames between the ones you've selected. Press Space to see the animation. Much better, isn't it, There's one issue with this animation—the eyes fade too abruptly. Let's fix this by creating another transition. Select the first and last frames again, and Tween them with the same number of frames as before. One last thing: find the frame with the brightest eyes and change its duration to a higher number. This will make the eyes shine longer. Finally, it's time to save the animation to present it to the world. Save For Web and select GIF from the list of formats. The options here will let you optimize the animation for smaller size. Now you know how to create an animated GIF in Photoshop! If you finished this tutorial, don't forget to share your result in the comments section—I can't wait to see it! However you can see the finished GIF in all its glory in video format below.

Now you're ready to upload this GIF to use in your marketing! Upload the GIF file into any place online that you'd put an image, and it should play seamlessly. Pinterest was the first to enable animated GIFs, followed by Twitter. And by the summer of 2015, Facebook had also jumped on the GIF bandwagon. Then, Instagram changed the game with Boomerang, which lets users film and share their own GIFs. On any of these social feeds, animated GIFs can be a great way to stand out in a crowded feed. Animated GIFs display in email the same way a regular image does. So why not spruce up your emails by replacing still images with animated ones, Not only could this help capture recipients' attention with novelty alone, but it could also have a direct impact on your bottom line. For some brands, including an animated GIF in emails correlated with as much as a 109% increase in revenue. Make use of GIFs by showcasing products, making event announcements, or otherwise enticing readers. Check out the GIF below from women’s clothing shop Ann Taylor LOFT: They made a present look like it's shaking to create intrigue and get recipients to click through to "unwrap" their gift. Your blog post doesn't have to be about animated GIFs or structured like a BuzzFeed-style listicle to include GIFs -- although, we do love a good dose of silly listicle GIFs every once in a while. And finally, one of our oldie-but-goodie favorites: an animated GIF from a post on office kitchen recipes. How will you use GIFs in your marketing, Share with us in the comments.