Remember this gif?
Memes are more popular than ever.
Meme culture has enveloped our lives in ways that are unimaginable. From being a topic exclusively on the Internet, we have started employing memes in real life. What started as a way to induce humor, it is even widely used these days to talk about freedom of speech.
The grumpy cat. The distracted boyfriend. Sand eating kid/success kid.
These were some of the most popular memes and are still used widely.
Memes of Gifs… they have become an indispensable part of our lives. We will discuss such GIF sites in this article.
10 Best GIF Sites to get Hilarious Memes in 2023
There is no denying the fact that GIFs and memes convey a lot of meaning with little or no text. Finding the right GIFs can be a daunting offer even if you know what exactly you want, which is why we have chosen 10 GIF sites from where you can make great memes. Here are the 10 best GIF sites from where you can get great memes:
1. Giphy
While having breakfast, Alex Chung and Jace Cooke had an idea for a business when they were thinking about rising trends in visual communication. The idea was Giphy. When it started, it was a search engine of sorts for GIFs. The site was able to attract around a million users within its first week.
- Giphy stopped being just a search engine. It started allowing users to post, embed and share GIFs on Facebook.
- It was recognized as one of the top 100 websites in its first year of operations itself. They started acquiring companies and they were getting funded too.
- Giphy partners with brands to host GIFs that can be used for marketing promotions. The company has partnered with more than 200 brands to host all their existing content on their own branded channel.
- Some of its partners are Disney, Calvin Klein, GE, Pepsi.
- In May this year, Giphy was purchased by Facebook for $400 million. Today, people around the world share more than 7 billion GIFs a day.
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2. Reddit
It calls itself the front page of the Internet. You can submit content to the site in the form of text, links and images. The GIFs on Reddit can be found in specific places. A subreddit is like a subsection. While diet can be a subreddit, you can find variations of subreddits on diets itself. For eg, you will find subreddits on Meditteranean diet, Keto diet, etc.
The engagement on Reddit is pretty high with people having the power to upvote or downvote your post based on their liking. While Reddit is a popular networking site, if you don’t follow the rules on each subreddit, you will be unceremoniously trolled. In fact, Reddit’s administrators spend time moderating the site.
Reddit was founded by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, students of the University of Virginia. As of May 2020, Reddit is ranked as the 19th most visited website in the world, according to Alexa.
3. Tenor
David Macintosh, Erick Hachenburg, and Frank Nawabi founded Tenor in 2014. It was later acquired by Google, but it is still functioning as an independent brand. It has more than 300 million users. You know this company better than the one that owns the GIF keyboard.
It has advanced search options using which you can get specific results.
4. Imgur
Founded in 2009, Imgur is an image-sharing community where viral images and memes are shared. It was started as a side project by Alan Schaaf who was at Ohio University studying Computer Science. It climbed to a million page views in the first five months. If you are looking for a specific meme, then Imgur is the place to go.
5. Tumblr
This 13-year-old site was started by David Karp. According to Alexa, it is the 112th most visited website on Earth. David was interested in short-form blogs and was hoping that some of the established blogging platforms will launch something like that. Once he realized that no one else was doing it, he started working on it with Marco Arment, a developer. In 2019, Tumblr was sold to Automatic, operator of WordPress.com, for $3 million. It was also owned by Yahoo and Verizon at one point of time.
While Tumblr isn’t as popular as it was earlier, you can still find GIFs and memes that will have you rolling on the floor.
6. GIFbin
It is another place for finding GIFs. These GIFs are categorized by both name and count. If you are a fan of retro, then the theme of GIFbin is perfect for you.
7. IMGflip
Do you want to see jokes created by Artificial Intelligence? Imgflip added a new feature called the AI Meme Generator that develops memes on its own. The words used in the memes generated by AI comes from some 100 million captions submitted to Imgflip’s meme generator.
The GIF site was trained using just 48 of the most popular memes and 20,000 captions per meme. The site has taken off big time. While not every meme generated hits the right note, some of them are said to be gems, based on newspaper reports. We tried to generate a few memes using the tool, but most of them didn’t make sense. You can try your luck with generating memes using AI, here.
8. Gfycat
The GIF site offers memes, GIFs, and short videos. Gfycat also allows its users to create and upload their own GIFs and videos.
9. GIF maker
With this site, you can turn almost anything into a GIF, like what the name signifies. Add unique effects to your photos to create a timeless meme. They have a mission and it reads like this-” bridge the gap between GIF and HTML5 video by providing both, allowing users faster delivery and more playback options.” GIF maker presents a lot of categories as well.
10. Know Your Meme
Know your Meme is a website that documents internet memes, viral videos, image macros, internet celebrities, catchphrases, and so on using Wiki software. It also investigates and researches memes. The 12- year old company, which was originally produced by Rocketboom, was acquired by Cheezburger Network, and finally by Literally Media.
11. CloudApp
Probably the best GIF-creating app on the market. With the help of the enterprise-level app, you can capture anything visible on screen. The app is simple to navigate and use. It can be used on Mac, Windows, Chrome, and iOS. Capturing and creating GIFs could not get easier. What is even more interesting? Drag and drop the selected GIF to the email and social working platforms to share.Time to accelerate your workflow!
Why Use Memes for Business?
Memes are widely used in marketing these days as they have a lot of benefits when compared with the forms used today. Let’s go through some of the benefits it offers:
1. Easy to make one
There are a lot of tools using which you can get the template for your memes. All you need to do is add the right text that your audience will enjoy. If you have the content with you, the rest of the things will take less than a minute. After you add the text, you can click on the generate button and your meme will be ready.
2. It is free
It may cost you money to hire people who will write the content for memes, but the rest of it is free. That is an extremely advantageous proposition as most other forms of content take money. In fact, you can even get free memes directly from a meme generator. You can use memegenerator.net or Appy Pie’s meme maker to generate memes based on your niche.
3. Easy virality
People share things that make them laugh. They want their friends to enjoy the joke as well, so it is extremely easy to go viral. Memes are a popular source of entertainment that is consumed by people of all age groups. If businesses do memes the right way, then it is a jackpot for them as the results are multifold.
4. Widens your reach
When people realize that your account shares a lot of funny memes, people will follow your brand even when they realize that they have never heard about your brand before. This will increase your brand value, more people will start valuing you and so on. Whichever channel you want to use for maximum leverage, your job will be easy because of the entry of memes in your marketing.
5. Connect with your audience
Any type of content, when there is the right amount of juice in it is consumed by people, it will be widely appreciated. But with memes, you can easily establish an emotional connection with humor or by associating the picture based on something that is emotionally important to the audience. You need to put yourself in the shoes of the customer to understand what makes them feel vulnerable. It shouldn’t be overly emotional, there should be a semblance of balance.
6. Add memes as images
When writing blog posts, you need interesting pictures that will add value to it. What better way to attract the attention of people than to include memes in it. Use images that are relevant to the topic or add text that makes it relevant.
7. Easy to consume
Watching a video requires a few minutes of focus. The same is the case when reading a blog post. But if there is one content format that hardly takes any time to consume and is easy to understand, then it has to be memes. It is exactly why memes are getting popular with the audiences these days.
How to use memes for business
Memes tend to capture what’s on our minds in the easiest form. If you are a business, it is great for humanizing your brand. You can even use them to talk about your company culture. It can lead to more engagement and people will identify your brand as authentic. There are a lot of brands that have a great meme game. But it is important not to get yourself in a legal tangle.
Here is how you can protect yourself from any backlash:
- Find out how much your brand can stretch itself thin when it comes to the content. You might not want to come across as too quirky or too controversial. It is best to draw that line so that there are no issues once you are continuously dishing out memes.
- Explore other images: If you think that a particular image will have implications, then you are right. Do not take a risk by using images that belong to someone else. Find out other images that do not have a copyright hold over it.
- Check the image rights. The last problem you need is to be taken to the courts for using a simple image in a meme.
Now that you know what you should do to stay careful, here are tips on how to win the meme game:
1. Understand your audience:
Making sure that you know the motivation of your audience, why they behave the way they do, why they choose to buy a particular product, etc., are goldmines for a marketer. This is the most important step that every marketer should do without fail even if they are only going to create a simple plan. The same goes for the memes that you use as well. You need to be careful about the tastes of your audience. If you were selling something premium and you want the brand to be identified as classy, then memes might not be the way to go.
2. Start small:
Do not be that company which has 50 memes ready and is planning to roll out one every day. Start your meme journey by sending it to a few of your users. Send them a survey using an online survey tool like SurveySparrow to find out what they felt about the memes used. Have your ear on the ground when you take new marketing steps.
3. Find your tone:
The voice and tone that you use in your memes will speak a lot about your brand. In fact, that’s how your customers will identify you. Memes can be extremely natural for a brand while it might look a little misplaced unless done correctly. If you are a successful brand, then you need to tread that fine line carefully.
4. Keep it simple:
No one likes a know-it-all. If the aim of your memes is to make your audience look stupid, then you are in for a treat as they will leave you in droves. Your memes should be understood by everyone. You need to use simple words while diving deep into pop culture that everyone is familiar with.
5. Don’t push too hard:
The memes shouldn’t be about your brand. Period. It can only feature it. Without a lot of effort, your audience should recognize it.
Conclusion
What do you do when you don’t find words to convey what you are feeling? GIFs and Memes of course. That’s how much communication has changed in the last few years. We truly believe that the meme culture will keep evolving over the days and we will find something better with each passing day.
Using the right kind of meme can make a world of difference to your audience. It can educate, entertain and inform your audience with a single image. That’s how powerful it is. When added to your blog post, your readers will appreciate the effort you have taken to create memes instead of adding stock images.
But here’s a piece of advice, if you decide to get into memes for your social media marketing, you might want to pace yourself slowly. It can be difficult at times to understand the pulse of your audience. Be careful about the language you use and the meaning you want to convey, because the interpretation of your audience can be completely different from what you intended it to be.,
Also, your potential customers can see right through if you keep promoting your brand always in the guise of memes. People will start unfollowing once they realize that your memes are only for marketing your brand and not for the sheer joy of spreading happiness which is how it should be. There is only a thin line between marketing and entertaining the audience. If you do it well, memes and GIFs can be your biggest asset.
