You have been seeing animated GIFs in Facebook personal profiles since spring, but not in Facebook Pages. Until now. Sticking its toe in the water, the Social Media Giant announced today that it has relaxed its NO-GIF policy. The experiment begins with a few selected brand pages to evaluate the use of GIFs and the users’ experience. Wendy’s and Coca-Cola’s Brazilian brand Kuat posted GIFs today.

The Original Post

And The GIF

 

You’ll see these new GIFs in “Boosted” Page posts — which make up most of the ads you see in your feed — not in those tiny sidebar ads. Facebook is phasing those puppies out.

“GIFs can be a fun and compelling way to communicate,” a company spokesperson wrote in an email. “We’ve started testing GIF support in posts and boosted posts for a small percentage of Facebook Pages… and will evaluate whether it drives a great experience for people before rolling it out to more Pages.”

Based on the performance of the advertisements, GIFs will be rolled out to all brand pages. But Facebook is cautious. The water temperature needs to be just right. It does not want to disrupt its users’ experience with annoying animations.