Successful brands understand the important role social media plays in their communication strategy. Copywriters spend hours drafting concise, informative posts that will hopefully catch the attention of their audience long enough for their message to resonate. Unfortunately, no matter how great that messaging might be, studies show that people remember only 20% of what they read. Even worse, people are likely to remember only 10% of that information within three days.
Social media users have long understood the entertainment value of a GIF, but could these moving images remedy our reading retention problem as well? Studies suggest that people can recall 65% of information they’ve read three days after the fact if there’s a relevant image they can associate with the piece. And what images are social audiences crazy about these days? GIFs. On Giphy alone (the services that supports Twitter’s built-in GIF search), more than 100 million active users watch more than 2 million hours of GIFs every day.
Shareability is additional benefit of adding a GIF to your social content, with visual posts 40x more likely to be shared. The New York Times pulled some data on how GIFs spread and the results were staggering. Every day, five million of them are sent via Facebook Messenger. On Tumblr, that number increases to 23 million.
The power of a GIF in terms of comprehension and share-value are undeniable. Factor in that GIF usage can also lead to a 42% increase in click rate, and there’s no reason every social marketer shouldn’t be using them.
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