Making Baptiste Yoga Stickers for Instagram Stories with GIPHY
I haven't played around with Instagram Stories very much, but when I was posting an IG story from Wax Wednesdays at Ella's and found a "rickroll' sticker - my first thought was "How the heck do stickers get into IG?"
I did some googling and found a few great "this is how you do it" posts:
The short version is: Create a Giphy account and get "brand" verified. If you're branding your account for your yoga studio, use a an email address that tied to your studio domain name - not a gmail or yahoo account (as an example).
Once you're approved as a brand account, you can make and upload stickers to GIPHY. When you upload your animated gif (sticker), you have the option to tag the image with words that will help it be found when people are searching on IG.
It takes a while for your new sticker (gif) to be visible in an IG search, so be patient.
GIPHY has very clear guidelines posted for stickers: Requirements for Sticker Approval.
Knowing that the Baptiste community is global, utilizes IG quite a bit - I made stickers of each section of the Journey Into Power sequence, the Baptiste logo, one for Sara Page, Mike Murdoch, Leandra, Baron and Luca (so far). The search phrase is 'Baptiste Yoga' to find all of them!
Making an animated gif on a transparent background can be done several ways.
- Unscreen.com can remove a background from a video file and export a gif of the video clip
- You can import a video clip into Photoshop to make an animated gif
- GIPHY can turn a video file into a gif (but not remove the background)
- Lunapic can be used to remove backgrounds and make transparent GIFs
- Online Image Editor has a transparency tool for making GIFs
I'll leave it at that - there are so many different ways to make animated gifs with transparent backgrounds. There's no one way to do it. I have a copy of Photoshop, but using Unscreen.com works pretty well if your clip is short. I've used Camtasia to record video snippets off my laptop screen and then turned those video snippets into gifs. If you're handy with using software to record video/edit images - making your own stickers (animated gifs with transparent backgrounds) will come naturally. If you've never worked with images or video in this manner, you'll find the online tools that do the work for you to be the easiest way to make your own IG stickers.
