How We Celebrate Our Customers with Personalized GIFs

Aug 3, 2016 3 min readOpen
Photo of Courtney Seiter
Courtney Seiter

Former Director of People @ Buffer

When you’re a fully remote team, all forms of communication take on much more importance. Since we don’t see each other face-to-face very often at Buffer, we have to think up other ways to express ourselves, so we focus a lot on our written communication, including emojis and lots of exclamation points, and of course, GIFs.

The same applies for our wonderful Buffer customers, too. While we can’t often see them in person, we get excited to come up with ways to tell them how much they mean to us, and how much we’re rooting for their social media success!

So we send a few special emails as customers achieve Buffer-specific milestones. We’d love to share them with you here!

Buffer birthday

Our teammates Arielle and Kelly help customers celebrate their Buffer anniversaries (we call them “Buffer birthdays”) with some spirit fingers:

Arielle and Kelly

100 updates

100 social media updates is no small feat! When you reach this milestone with Buffer, your future is so bright Bonnie has to wear shades:

Bonnie glasses

1,000 updates

When customers reach the incredible milestone of 1,000 social media updates with Buffer, it’s an unbelievable accomplishment—and Roy does a double take at your super full queue!

Roy

Great post

When one of your social media posts hits the big time with reach and shares, Alfred just might show up in your inbox to give you a high-five:

Alfred

Sharing streak

Consistent sharing is a great way to build more engagement, so we love to celebrate a sharing streak. Especially our co-founder Leo, who expresses his enthusiasm with a dance for you:

Leo dance

Even more GIFs!

We also have lots more GIFs that are in need of an occasion!

Do any of these Buffer team member GIFs inspire anything for you? We’re always up for finding new occasions to share with our customers and community.

steve kelly
airport seats
Michael mask
Steve
Deb
Jordan
Juliet
Marcus
Andy and Eric
Niel GIF

5 tools we use to make GIFs

Ready to turn your Slack channel or social media channels into a GIF party? Here are some of the tools we use to make GIFs at Buffer.

1. Sir Gifs a Lot, which connects to Slack for easy GIF-ing (Just install it and type /gifalot to start recording!)

2. Gifs.com, to create GIFs from videiso (all you need to do is paste the URL of the video you’d like to convert to a GIF, and you’re all set)

3. Giphy GIF Maker, which enables you to create GIFs directly from video files or YouTube links

4. Giphy Slideshow, to combine your pictures and GIFs to create animated GIF slideshows

5. Gifmaker.me, which allows you to create animated gifs and slideshows from images

And you can grab a full tutorial with our Ultimate Guide to Animated GIFs!

Over to you!

We’d love to see your fun GIFs or hear about other visual tools you might use to keep connected and have fun at work, or to celebrate with your customers! Share them below in the comments or anytime with us on Twitter!

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