GIFs files have existed for decades now which in the beginning were extremely popular and later on the charm of GIF almost disappeared. Thanks to Social Media platforms, the GIFs are back in business and are being used frequently by users in the form of memes by youth and informative messaging assets by corporates, making it one of the indispensible media types for usage.

Social Networks and their support for GIF

Twitter
Twitter supports GIF with all its heart. GIFs are frequently used for creating colorful memes to creating informative posts having multiple frames/ slides.

Following are the specifications for GIF file:

Animated GIFs can be up to 5MB on mobile, and up to 15MB on web.
Animated GIFs can't be included in Tweets with multiple images. You can send only one GIF in a Tweet. Source - https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/tweeting-gifs-and-pictures
Maximum horizontal resolution is and aspect ratio required is <= 1280x1080 (eg: https://twitter.com/gaurangagg/status/1323811936790749184)

1280x1080 pic.twitter.com/T1puOJYFX4

— GAURANG (@gaurangagg) November 4, 2020

The resolution 1024x512 appears like this - https://twitter.com/gaurangagg/status/1323810697302601728

testing GIF - 1024x512 pic.twitter.com/NBbMpqD7xb

— GAURANG (@gaurangagg) November 4, 2020

Facebook
Facebook supports GIF files . 

Following are the specifications for GIF file:
- Supported Resolution are: 1280x1080 - https://www.facebook.com/gaurangagg/posts/3222318567897681
All part of the GIF file is accurately visible making it a great choice.

Also, 1024x512px is a great choice as well: https://www.facebook.com/gaurangagg/posts/3222324161230455

LinkedIn
LinkedIn supports GIF files. Since it is poorly documented, I tried uploading GIF files of various file sizes to find the breaking point. And I did find it. LinkedIn supports GIF files of upto 50MBs. After 50MBs, it starts giving out a random error message. A great discovery for me today. No one really makes heavy GIF files as that would result in bad user experience as majoority of LinkedIn users are mobile users and that GIF file alone would consume 50MBs from their data packs. Love your followers by keeping asset sizes small. For landscape GIFs, the typical 1200x628pixels will be just great.

#LinkedIn now lets you reply with GIFs over the DMs. Interesting stuff.

#SocialMedia #SMM

Instagram
Instead doesn’t support GIF files at all. Only Image and video files are supported.

To compare the output of GIF files in social posts with the original post, I have included both types.