How to Animate Your Static Promo Images for Better Social Media Engagement
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How to Animate Your Static Promo Images for Better Social Media Engagement

February 8, 2018

Movement Creates Engagement

I do a lot of things (thus the whole one-man-band-man horn tooting you’ll find across my social media networks): music, storytelling, design, marketing – all kinds of nonsense. Anyhow, there’s one thing I’ve learnt recently. Colour and imagery dramatically boosts post engagement on social media.

Check out this goodness from Hubspot, for example:

1) 37% of marketers said visual marketing was the most important form of content for their business, second only to blogging (38%).
2) 74% of social media marketers use visual assets in their social media marketing, ahead of blogs (68%) and videos (60%).
3) When people hear information, they’re likely to remember only 10% of that information three days later. However, if a relevant image is paired with that same information, people retained 65% of the information three days later.
4) B2C marketers place greater importance on visual content than B2B marketers.
5) 51% of B2B marketers prioritized creating visual content assets in 2016.

Cool, right? So what does that have to do with what I’m about to tell you? Well, everything under the Godly sun and more. Obviously, static images are great. They lure your readers/listeners/fans/target market in like fish to bait. But what if there was a way to stand-out even more than you currently do?

You made a bad-ass image, I get that. Your branding is on-point, your fonts are consistent and your colour palette could take the breath away from an eskimo in an igloo. But the darn thing doesn’t move – it just sits, idling, waiting for a gust of wind to dissect it into jello.

After a while, too heavy-a-focus on dry image content can get a little vapid.

That’s where ‘animation’ comes in. You don’t need to do anything fancy, either. Heck, all you need is a little movement, some motion to steal your viewer’s attention for that extra second or two.

So what do I suggest? My go-to lately has been Final Cut Pro.

Step 1

Load up your image in Final Cut Pro and set the output resolution to a custom size that reflects the pixels in your image.

Step 2

Locate the the ‘Quick Flash/Spin’ effect in your effects browser as per below:

Final Cut Pro Effects Tip Author Fiction Melbourne

Step 3

Apply the ‘Quick Flash/Spin’ effect to your image. Voila! Your image is now super-duper-bad-ass!

Step 5

Render your image as a video and use a software like Handbrake to compress and convert it to a .mp4 file.

Step 6

Upload your video to your social media channel or use a website like EZGif.com to convert your .mp4 file to a .gif.

If you’ve followed these steps correctly, you’re going to get something like the video above – an engaging, attention-grabbing 5-second video promotion that does everything a static image can do… and more!

Good luck creating your own and let me know if you get stuck in the comments below!

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