Facebook Starts Testing GIFs In Ads And Page Posts

For approximately a decade, Facebook refused to fill up its site with flashy, animated banner ads. Zuckerberg was of the mind that these ads interrupted the user experience and could therefore stunt the social media network’s growth. However, now that the company has a massive user base that is acclimatized to video ads, Facebook has announced that it’s starting to allow businesses to post GIFs as ads and Page posts.

For auto dealerships, this opens up a new world of creative opportunities to develop Facebook ads and Page posts that catch the eye in a dynamic way that wasn’t possible until now. Wendy’s and Coca-Cola’s Brazilian brand Kuat are the first businesses Facebook is allowing to share GIFs on its platform, with the Wendy’s ad showing a salad being constructed, while Kuat’s ad is more-or-less the campy, rainbow-shooting poptart meme Nyan Cat with a brand name placed on it.

In May, the social media network first started supporting GIFs in user posts, but it hadn’t allowed businesses to utilize them until now.

“GIFs can be a fun and compelling way to communicate, so we’ve started testing GIF support in posts and boosted posts for a small percentage of Facebook Pages,” the company told TechCrunch. “We will evaluate whether it drives a great experience for people before rolling it out to more Pages.”

Of course, any time that a social media network enhances its ad offerings, there will be at least a minor backlash from users who feel that the increased presence of advertisements makes their experience on the platform less enjoyable. So, it’s always a balancing act between keeping users happy while providing marketers with robust and effective ad products. Clearly, with this move, Facebook thinks that its users won’t be too bothered by seeing GIFs in ads and Page posts, and it will be interesting to see how much disruption they will cause.

“GIFs are a content type no longer relegated to platforms like Tumblr and Reddit,” said Brad Eshbach, director of content innovation at social media agency socialdeviant. “GIFs have become a new, non-verbal way of getting a finessed point across when communicating on social media or in a text with your BFFs (Best Friends Forever). With the growth of auto-play video on Facebook, GIFs will no longer feel glaringly out of place. Users have become accustomed to their feeds being frantic and flashing like a banner ad, for better or worse.”

To preserve the user experience, Facebook will most likely take an aggressive approach to how the News Feed treats posts from businesses that contain GIFs, to ensure that they don’t alienate too many people. If there is a significant backlash, perhaps Facebook will remove these posts from the News Feed entirely. Truthfully, GIFs can really jump off the screen in a powerful way, and the potential for user backlash seems fairly high if these ads and posts become prevalent. We’ll be watching to see if the early tests prove successful or if the entire idea gets scrapped due to major user resistance.