How to Make Your Content Engaging with GIFS & Animations
You have eight seconds to pull someone in to read your blog. What do you do? Have a catchy headline like “The Inside Secrets of Hollywood You Didn’t Know?” Okay, but what if you’re writing a blog about tax policies? A title like “Become a Millionaire Knowing these Tax Policies” may draw in some viewers, but they might not stay long if your content isn’t engaging. There’s a way to add more engagement to your content and that’s with the help of GIFs or animations, and here’s why:
The human brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than text.
Let’s be honest: unless the person reading your blog is extremely interested in your topic, they’re most likely not going to read the whole thing, especially if it’s long. People want information quickly and it takes longer for our brain to process words than it does images. This is because we have to clump letters together, then words, and then sentences to understand what is being said. However, with an image our brain only has to look at it to understand emotions, concepts, and more.
We only have 8-second attention spans.
A few years ago we had 12-second attention spans! If you look at the advances our world has made in the past few years, there is a clear reason why our attention spans have decreased: our world is becoming more fast-paced. Do you remember when you had to wait a solid minute or two for your Google search to go through? Now we only wait seconds before we’re given a list of pages to look at. Social media has also influenced this as videos are no longer than 3 minutes. This makes it easy for users to keep swiping and lose interest quickly. This is why imagery is so important because it can be understood so much quicker during our short attention spans!
Animations/GIFs can get more than double the amount of clicks as static images.
According to a study done by Facebook, animated images attracted 1.5x more clicks than static ones. To test this, they sent out a series of two ads on the same topic, where one used a static image and the other used an animated one. The results speak for themselves!
Facebook isn’t the only company that has done this research though. A study by databox also found that videos drove an 11% higher conversion rate than static images. On top of that, videos also generated the most efficient cost per lead and 75% of the overall click volume!
Ready to step up your content?
As content creators, balancing your content mix between text and visuals is so important; including animations and GIFs to capture your audience’s attention for longer.
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