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Creating an Animation Marketing Strategy for Social Media

Animation is an incredible tool for communication, and that’s why you need to think about how an animation marketing strategy can work for you. Whether it’s used to make complex information accessible in an explainer video or just to add visual interest to a page on a website, animation can take your social media and content marketing campaigns to the next level.

I love animation—both making it and watching it—and it’s exciting to see animated content becoming an important asset for digital marketing, especially on social media. As animation becomes more and more prevalent on social networks, you might consider incorporating it into your own company’s marketing strategy. 

Here, I lay out why you should develop an animation marketing strategy for your social media; when it’s most strategic to use animation in your company’s social media posts; and how you can make your own animated content for social media.

Why You Should Develop a Social Media Animation Marketing Strategy

Incorporating animation into your social media accounts can help make your content stand out, drive audience engagement, and enhance your overall marketing strategy.

Generate Unique, Attention-Grabbing Content

It’s been estimated that people see, on average, 6,000 to 10,000 ads daily. With such a huge volume of advertisements reaching social media users every day, it’s important that your company cuts through the noise, whether that’s with organic or paid posts. Animated posts can serve as a way to do just that, providing you with unique content that can communicate your message more effectively to your audience.

Engage with Your Audience

Employing animation on your social media is a great strategy for increasing engagement with your audience. While a user might scroll past an image, it’s more likely that they’ll stop scrolling to watch a video. Facebook ad experiments and surveys of marketers who create content for Facebook indicate that ads with video or animation often outperform those without video in terms of audience engagement—and ad cost! Twitter’s internal data shows that users engage 55% more with tweets that contain GIFs versus ones that don’t.

Enhance Your Overall Marketing

Finally, when added to a larger campaign, an animation marketing strategy can enhance the effectiveness of your marketing. In one analysis, 76% of marketers said that animated videos helped increase sales and traffic. Although, of course, sales, traffic, and engagement levels vary based on the quality of your content, the specificity of your audience, and many other factors of your overall marketing strategy, using animated videos can be a great addition to your company’s social media marketing.

Animation Marketing Strategy: When to Use It

Animated posts are a great addition to your social media marketing strategy. But when should you use animation on your social media feeds? Although there are no hard and fast rules about incorporating animation, here are a few suggestions for when animated posts might be particularly effective.

Visualizing What You Can’t Photograph

Animation is a great option for adding relevant visual content to your social media when you’re not able to photograph the real thing. Let’s say, for example, that your company wants to post about National Bike to Work Day. You’d like to post something a bit more specific than a stock photo of an actor riding a bike, but you’re not equipped to take your own photo or video of someone biking. In this case, using an animation of someone riding a bike means you can post specific, unique visual content that engages your audience and matches your aesthetic.

 

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Spicing Up Your Content

Whether you don’t have any recent company news, it’s too early to post about a future event, or it’s just your off-season, there are times when you find yourself looking for interesting, varied content to post on your social media. You shouldn’t stop posting. Incorporating animation into your social media posts can help you spice up drab content; replace repetitive or less engaging imagery; or just serve as fun, relevant content to keep up post schedules until more topical content comes along.

Adding Fun Content

Animated social media posts are great to use along with particularly fun or exciting content. Celebrations, birthday announcements, holiday greetings, and other feel-good posts are all well-suited for bouncy, cheerful animated visuals. Along with an upbeat caption, social media animations like these will help your audience celebrate along with you!

How to Create Animated Content for Social Media

It’s easier than you might think to develop a social media marketing strategy that includes animation. There is a wide range of tools available for developing simple yet effective animated content, both within social media networks themselves and online.

Built-In Social Media Animation Tools

Many of the major social media networks have built-in or add-on tools for adding animated elements to posts, stories, or ads. You can add filters and GIFs to your Instagram stories, or use Instagram’s Boomerang app to make short repeating video clips. On Facebook, you can utilize the Ripl tool to create animated ads from static content. And of course, you can add GIFs galore to your tweets, Pinterest pins, and Facebook posts.

 

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Online Tools & Resources

There are several other external strategies for making animated assets for social media that are free and easy to use. Among the many free online tools available for creating GIFs, Giphy allows you to upload a video or source a video from the Internet, decorate it with text and graphics, and export it to use on your social media or elsewhere. Free apps like Draw Motion and premium tools like Cinemagraph Pro enable you to create cinemagraphs, a type of media that contains photo and looped video elements. You can also find a wide variety of animations available for use (some for free and some for purchase) on sites like Videezy and iStock, among many others.

Let Us Craft Your Social Media Animation Marketing Strategy

If you’re interested in taking your social media animation marketing to the next level, our design team at Online Optimism can help! Watch our reel to get a feel for our previous animation work, and check out our animation services and social media marketing pages for more information on how we incorporate animation and utilize social media marketing to boost our clients’ businesses. Contact us today.