Facebook Introduces Animated GIFs For Users, But Not Brands

Reaction shots on Facebook are about to get a lot more animated. The social media site now shows users’ animated GIFs in news feeds, but brands are not able to display the looped media format on their pages.

Facebook auto-plays GIFs in users’ feeds, much like it does with native video uploaded to the site (which now garner the social site four billion daily views). The success of Facebook video likely drove the site to add support for animated GIFs, especially considering the popularity of GIFs on sites like Imgur, Tumblr, and Reddit.

Users can put a link to a GIF in their status updates, which then converts into the looping image when the status is posted. However, brands don’t seem to have the same privilege. Adweek pulled a tweet from Sesame Street’s Director of New Media Communication Dan Lewis

which noted Facebook’s lack of support for GIF’s on brand’s pages.

GIFs have been one of the most-shared pieces of content on the web for years. YouTube recognized this, and is currently testing out a GIF feature on select channels. Video analytics and marketing company Epoxy even added a GIF creator to its Sharing Studio to enable creators in making more forms of content they can share across social media.

But brands on Facebook can’t participate in the GIF-sharing craze, at least not yet. We’ll have to see if Facebook adds support for the looping image format to brand pages in the future.