GIF Inspiration From The Basketball Season (So Far)

By Jessica Smith On December 6, 2015 In NBA, Twitter

I talked about this early in the football season, but the sports industry is stepping up its GIF game. Long gone are the days where teams and leagues focus only on pop culture GIFS. Now, teams and leagues are creating their own on-brand GIFS with originality and creativity. I curated a great collection of GIFS for the football season. Now it’s time for basketball to shine.

Before we get into the examples though, here are some tips for using GIFS:

 

No. 1- Pick your moments.

GIFS can be overused. Take the time to think through a strategy for your GIFS and figure out the moments where you can use them for the greatest impact. What moments cause great reactions? That’s when GIFS work well. Remember, GIFS are a treat and not an every tweet thing.

 

No. 2- Avoid redundancy.

GIFS can be a powerful content piece to enhance play-by-play coverage. It gets extremely redundant thought using the exact same GIFS over and over again for a certain moment. If you plan GIFS for certain in-game plays, then consider creating several options to pull from. GIFS can absolutely be repurposed and used again, but there’s a fine line before the content gets boring. It’s important to find a way to mix it up.

 

No. 3- Find the humor in YOUR brand/team.

Teams often look to find humorous GIFS outside their team, but humorous GIFS can be really powerful when teams leverage their own footage to give us a laugh. Take the time to go through football and find those funny moments you can splice and dice.

Julie Phayer of the Warriors actually did a poll asking what type of GIFS fans preferred GIFS that featured the team and players over pop culture ones:

https://twitter.com/juliephayer/status/672468880980226049

 

No. 4- Focus on cadence.

GIFS work well on Twitter because they’re short, sweet and quick. If you go about creating graphic-heavy GIFS, make sure the cadence is quick enough to grab and keep your fan’s attention. The cadence is a bit art and science, but play around with the length and movement to understand what works best.

 

No. 5- If you use pop culture GIFS….

make them relevant to your team. A few of us in the #smsports community got into a conversation about GIFS, and @Ober made a great point: Pop culture GIFS are more impactful when the theme somehow ties back to your brand (even loosely). His example:  The Eagles using Fresh Prince GIFs because of the Philly connection.

 

Now that you have these tips in mind, it’s time to get inspired. Below is a collection of some of the best GIFS I have seen so far this basketball (NBA and college) so far this season. Enjoy!
 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 
 

 

 

Have you seen any GIFS you love? Share them below!

Thanks for reading!

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