Facebook actually began to allow animated GIFs for personal Facebook users, however most people aren’t aware that Facebook made the change in May.
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Facebook tells me “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”.
If Facebook’s smart, it will take a very aggressive approach to how the News Feed treats these posts in order to preserve the user experience.
Facebook is still holding back on offering GIF support to Facebook pages for businesses, so it’ll be a while before brands are able to reap the virality benefits of posting GIFs as posts.
So basically, if users hate them and they don’t perform well, Facebook will scrap them.
It seems that Facebook is starting to ease up on the ban where flashy banner ads are concerned, enabling businesses to post promotional animated GIFs.
But according to TechCrunch, Wendy’s and Coke-owned German soda Kuat are the first to test out actual GIFs on the social network. The social networking platform is hosting such GIF ads on “Boosted” Page posts, which essentially are responsible for most of the ads users see on their News Feed, since GIFs can not be placed on the small sidebars that the company is slowly phasing out.
It remains to be seen whether the novel advertising plan will work or not. The Wendy’s ad is an empty salad bowl that becomes a full salad bowl.
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Advertisements that pop up on Facebook could get more animated.
