Social media is the future of marketing. All popular brands have curated their presence across all social media platforms and have created strategies to boost their influence among such platforms. Instagram is of the top three most popular social media platforms that will form you an audience.
The variety of actions available on Instagram allows for excellent marketing campaigns. Posting stories on your social media, especially on Instagram will keep your audience up to date with the latest news you wish to include. Instagram made it possible to add various actions to your stores to make them more engaging and interesting. One of these components is the gif stickers.
You can use them to animate your stories and make them more appealing to your audience. That is why in this article we will show you how to make your own gif stickers to boost your reach and engagement on Instagram.
What are Instagram Gif Stickers?
Being able to make your own gif stickers will have you level up your Instagram game and reach new audiences effortlessly, but what are Instagram gif stickers? We’ve all been through the era when gifs first started to surface on the internet. Gifs or Graphics Interchange Format is a type of image format that allows you to create animations based on multiple images.
I believe we’ve all done those drawings on each page of a book or notebook and when you flip through the pages it’s as if your drawing is moving. Just like gifs, gif stickers are short animations based on multiple layers of images or illustrations. Instagram made it possible to add gif stickers when you upload to your story so that you can embed that fun, cool, and exciting element into your Insta stories.
Gif stickers are available for everyone, you simply search for a specific tag or keyword and you’ve been presented with countless creative gif stickers. The collection of gif stickers is not solely made by Instagram, the beauty behind this trend is that you can also create and make your own gif stickers and have them be used widely by everyone on the app.
This helps you open another gate of audience reach and a creative way of expanding your online presence.
Why Create your Own Gif Stickers?
The popularity of Instagram has only grown larger ever since the platform was established. Although it is primarily an app-based platform, Instagram is the 5th most visited website. This means that Instagram’s reach goes far beyond what was primarily intended. Looking it from a business point of view, creating a personalized, omni-channeled marketing strategy for Instagram could grant you immense success.
One way of uplifting your marketing strategy and which can also be fun to do is to make your own gif stickers for Instagram that can be used by every Instagram user. Statistics show that there are 500 million daily active users of Instagram Stories. This can be a window of opportunity to present your brand to this massive audience.
Now looking at it from an organic traffic perspective, creating custom gif stickers will help you achieve brand awareness and brand loyalty. A lot of brands carefully plan their Instagram posting strategy, always making sure it lines up with the guidelines of their brand, but one simple step that should now be missed is Instagram Stories.
You can get more efficient with your content if your brand’s signature is applicable everywhere. By using personalized Instagram gif stickers, your viewers can associate your brand with your business. What’s even better is that when you make your own gif stickers for Instagram, they will be available to the entire Instagram community.
Creating your own Instagram stickers will strengthen your brand’s identity while also expanding your creative assets.
How to Make your Own Gif Stickers for Instagram?
- Create a brand account in Giphy
- How to create the Gif Stickers
- Upload your Gif Stickers to Giphy
- Integrate your Gif Stickers on your Insta story
In this tutorial, we will show you how to make your own gif stickers for Instagram and how to make them accessible to everyone on the app. We will follow all the simple steps to creating and crafting your stickers alongside some tips and tricks on how to optimize them.
The only two things you need for the process are the knowledge of one of the designing tools to make your own gif stickers and a branded channel on Giphy, the rest is history.
Create a brand account in Giphy
Instagram’s gif stickers are powered by Giphy, the most popular platform for creating and finding gifs that offer a massive repository of creative, cool, and fun animated gifs. In order to have your custom gif stickers be available on Insta story, you will need to create a branded account with Giphy and apply for it to be verified before you make your own gif stickers.
You can easily and quickly create a brand account with Giphy, but the verification process might take a while. To create a brand channel simply visit the Giphy page and click on the Login button. Next switch to Sign Up and fill in the necessary information and click on Sign Up.
This way you’ve only created a regular account in Giphy, in order to apply for a branded account you will first need to upload 5 gifs or stickers. You should make your own gif stickers and these uploads should be your own creations and best represent your brand.
Once you’ve published 5 or more gifs you can apply for a Giphy branded account here. a brand account on Giphy is provided with an analytics dashboard that displays how your gifs are being received by users and offer valuable insights on how popular your gif stickers are and how efficient your Instagram stories strategy is.
How to create the Gif Stickers?
Now it’s the part where you make your own gif stickers, you can select your preferred program to use, it can either be Adobe Programs like Illustrator, Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere Pro, or other programs like Procreate.
This is what makes the distinction between gifs and sticker gifs. Depending on the type of gif you are creating, you will also be prompted to use the designated program for the job. Like if you are creating an image or font sticker, you can use Illustrator or Photoshop, but when you want to create a gif sticker that includes people or faces, you can use After Effects or Premiere Pro to edit the video and then utilize the power of Photoshop to save the video as a gif.
Keep in mind that when you make your own gif sticker you should apply all the layers to create movements and that the background should be transparent. To have your background be transparent in After Effects when you render the video, click on Lossless, from the Video Output section, you must select the Channels to be RGB+Alpha. To save the video as a gif format, from File > Export select the Save for Web (Legacy) option.
To create a gif in Photoshop you must:
- Upload your images in Photoshop. To upload all at once select File > Scripts > Load Files Into Stack.
- Click on Window and have the Timeline be displayed on the screen. This will allow you to turn ON and OFF various layers making your static images turn into GIF
- Right-click on the Timeline and select the “Create Frame Animation” option.
- Create a new layer for every new frame. To do that click on Select > All Frames. Click on the menu icon on the timeline and select Create new layer for each new frame.
- Click again on the menu icon from the timeline and this time choose the Make Frames from Layers option.
- Under each frame, choose how long will the frame be visible before it switches to the other frame.
- At the bottom toolbar, choose the duration for the animation. You can either set it to Once, Three Times, or Forever.
- Click on File > Export > Save for Web (Legacy). This will render your animation as a gif and you’ll be ready for the next step which is to upload your gif stickers.
You can make your own gif stickers using your preferred program/app/software. Just make sure you follow the guidelines of Giphy which will be discussed more in the next section.
Upload your Gif Stickers to Giphy
Once you’ve created your own gif stickers and your account has been approved as a branded account then you shall proceed to upload your own gif stickers in Giphy.
Note that in order for the gif sticker to be available on your Insta story, you must upload it as a sticker, not as a gif. We mentioned that transparency is what makes the distinction between gifs and sticker gifs. Read more about the requirements for sticker approval.
- First off login to your Giphy account and click on Upload.
- You will be prompted to upload either a gif or a sticker, select Choose File from the Sticker Tab
- Once your sticker gif has been uploaded, you should see an upload dashboard that allows you to further customize your creations towards the proper audience
- Turn ON the Public option for the gif to be published immediately. You can also set them as private, and publish them at another time.
- Here you should add the tags for the sticker gif. Make sure you type in the proper tags because your sticker gifs will be apparent on other people’s searches. This is how your sticker gis will appear on Instagram Stories search. Also, make sure you type in the name of your brand/company/business in the tag section. This is helpful for when users search for your brand, they will see the entire collection of sticker gifs you’ve created.
- From the Source URL, you must type in the domain of your website
- Click on Upload to Giphy and that should be it.
Just because you’ve published your sticker gif, that does not mean it will immediately be available on Insta Stories. Giphy does some analysis of their own to make sure everything is aligned with the guidelines, meaning it might take a while for the sticker to be visible on Instagram Stories.
Once Giphy approves your stickers, you can easily find them by searching one of the tags you’ve included during the publishing process. This is the final step on how to make your own gif stickers for your Instagram Stories.
Integrate your Gif Stickers on your Insta story
Once you have created and uploaded your stickers, it’s time to put them to the test. If you’ve integrated all the steps we showed during this tutorial on how to make your own gif stickers to boost your Instagram Stories, then this should be a treat. Once Giphy has approved your sticker/s, simply
- Log in to your Instagram account
- Tap to create a new Story
- Include an image/video or media file of your choosing
- Click on the Sticker button at the top of the screen and then select GIF
- Search for the gif sticker you’ve created either using your brand’s name or a descriptive tag you’ve included
- If the sticker was approved it should be visible on the search and you can easily include them to raise brand awareness among your Insta stories.
Final Thoughts
It’s time we wrap up this article on how to make your own gif sticker for your Instagram stories to increase engagement, raise brand awareness as well as reach a new audience through this portal. Gifs are a great tool to make your posts more attractive and grab the attention of the user. For this article, we discussed the importance of gif stickers to pave the way for other effective alternatives to your marketing strategy.
Social media platforms are an invaluable asset to gain more reach and traffic and convert visitors due to their massive expansion. Instagram is one of the most popular and used social media platforms, it would be a shame not to take advantage of every opportunity it provides. Start making impressions today to encourage users to follow along with your funnels.
