Why You Need a GIPHY Channel

If you have ever added an animated sticker on one of your Instagram Stories, you have used a GIF or “sticker”. These little stickers are used by billions of people worldwide across multiple platforms, including Instagram and TikTok. GIPHY.com hosts the most popular GIFs on the web and is one of the best kept secrets in the digital marketing world.

My client Dew Tour launched their GIPHY channel (https://giphy.com/dewtour) a couple of years ago and we have seen over 2.6 billion cumulative views! You are able to add keywords for each GIF, which makes them searchable for anyone looking for a GIF of someone “pointing” or “laughing” for example. During both the Winter and Summer Dew Tour events we set up a green screen and LED lights during athlete registration and invite our athletes to create a custom GIF. 99% of them agree to film a GIF because it’s fun to make silly faces and poses and it takes minimal effort to film. Also, people love using GIFs of themselves in their IG Stories and TikToks. Since many of these athletes are famous, when they use their Dew Tour-branded GIF it may be seen by millions of people.

Launching a channel for your brand on GIPHY is completely free and it’s not too difficult to set up a green screen with lights and have someone film a person doing a funny pose for four seconds. In order to upload a completed GIF to GIPHY you need to have access to After Effects and/or Photoshop in order to clip out the person. Once you upload your GIF and it’s approved, it usually appears on your GIPHY channel (and on Instagram, TikTok, etc.) within 24 hours. I always thought it would be cool for a tattoo shop to permanently have a green screen set up in their studio to create GIFs with clients who just got finished getting a tattoo.

Below is a GIF I made of myself during the most recent Dew Tour contest and it already has almost 10k views thanks to my good looks (hahaha!) and use of popular and diverse tags.