Great Social Media Idea: Hosting Gifs on Giphy

Today's entry from the suggestion box is Harvard's great use of the website Giphy to host all of the gifs they create for their digital content.

In my own work at UP, I have embraced creating custom gifs for listicles and athletics highlights, but I'm particularly excited by Harvard's use of gifs for research articles, which is not only really cool but also the type of thing that has the potential to get re-posted on sites like Reddit and Tumblr.

Anyway, I'll let the brilliant Mike Petroff (if you don't follow him on Twitter - for shame! - you should do so immediately).

“Harvard is now on GIPHY.com, which allows others to find, embed, and share Harvard GIFs.

Find us at: http://giphy.com/harvard

Some background: Animated GIFs have joined photo, video, and audio as commonplace on major publishing platforms, and we wanted a way to publicly host the animated GIFs we produced for social media and the Harvard Gazette news website. Giphy is searchable and allows for GIF uploads to be embedded by others, giving attribution back to Harvard if other sites want to share GIFs we’ve created.

Just as YouTube hosts embeddable video and SoundCloud hosts our embeddable audio, we’re using Giphy to host embeddable GIFs.”

As social media managing continues to evolve into digital content publishing and bringing print online, it's absolutely worth thinking about how to best leverage the things we create - photos, videos, gifs, infographics, etc. - to reach people beyond our own institutional website and social media pages.

If you make Gifs that you think might have the potential to reach what Scott Stratten calls the "third circle," it's definitely worth following Harvard's lead and looking into Giphy as a means by which they can be shared.

Thanks, Mike, for passing along this great idea!