Tuesday tips & tricks: How to add personality to your posts with emoji, gifs and memes

[Erica Moss]

Who doesn’t love a good Tuesday tip on a Wednesday? (Apologies for the delay!) This time, I wanted to share some best practices on a topic I care deeply about: adding flair to your posts here on the Community.

It can be challenging to decipher a person’s tone in an online setting, so things like emoji and gifs can help further illustrate a point. Here’s how to start making your posts a little more personable:

Emoji: If you’re on a Mac, hit Control + Command + Space bar in the text box where you want to add the emoji. Voila! You’ve got all of them at your fingertips. On a PC, click on the touch keyboard symbol on the taskbar or right click on the taskbar and select Toolbars > Touch Keyboard. Then click the smiley face. 😎

Gifs: Whether you pronounce the word like the peanut butter brand, or the proper way with the hard G, these animations are a great way to articulate an emotion. Giphy is a great repository for them (just type the emotion you’re trying to convey in the search bar the top), or you can do a quick Google Image search (example: “excited gif”). Eventually, you start to develop an encyclopedic knowledge of your faves, and can use super specific search terms like “you got it dude gif” to access them faster.

To include them in your post on the Community, simply copy the gif’s URL (example: https://media.giphy.com/media/l41lZxzroU33typuU/giphy.gif), click the Insert Photos button above the text box, click URL, paste it and click Insert.

Memes: Pronounced like “meem,” these images and videos represent a concept or catchphrase, often with a viral effect on sites like Reddit and Twitter. Sites like Know Your Meme keep a record of the super popular as well as the obscure.

Some classic memes that have withstood the test of time include the Pun Husky:

Grumpy Cat

Evil Kermit

… and many, many more.

Add your own text to the photos with sites like Meme Generator, and insert them like you would a photo into your post.

I hope you’re having 34% more fun already. Share your favorite gif or meme in the comments below!

[Max Foerster - K15t]

You had my like when you pronounced "Gif" the only right way! 😂

[Erica Moss]

@Max Foerster - K15t Ugh, that makes me so happy!

[Manon Soubies-Camy]

The GIF creator himself said it here:

And, in a flash, it all became clear:"It's pronounced JIF, not GIF."

[Max Foerster - K15t]

@Manon Soubies-Camy and so it began.

[Kat Warner]

Jif is a brand of cleaner here. 

[carolyn french]

If you ask an American to pick up some Jif at the supermarket, you'll get something very different! Both are creamy though, food for thought... Let them return to their battle of pronunciation 🤣

[Erica Moss]

@Kat Warner I learned something new today. 😄

[Gezim Shehu [Communardo]]

Simple stuff, but often overlooked.

Thanks for the tips

[Erica Moss]

@Gezim Shehu [Communardo] 🙌🏼

[carolyn french]

Just learned something new with that URL posting feature! Thanks for helping out us olds @Erica Moss

[Erica Moss]

@carolyn french Ha! Here for you, always. 🙌🏼

[Carol Jones]

Holy cow, you just opened a whole new world for me with the Control + Command + Space bar.  This is awesome, thank you!!!

[Alison]

Gifs and emojis definitely make posts better - thanks for sharing these tips and tricks! (and reiterating it's a hard G in gif!)

[Danno]

Erica, I can't get a GIF to "stick". I tried yesterday and got a confirmation from another member that they couldn't post one either. We assumed it was a technical glitch and that it would get fixed. I tried again today and it still isn't working. Do you know what's up on Atlassian's end?

[Monique vdB]

@Danno did you add some text along with the gif? Unfortunately there's a bug in discussion posts where you can't post a standalone image.

The other possibility is that it was too big. I want to say 2MB is the max size?

[Danno]

Thanks Monique. The need to add text was the issue. I apologize if I gave Erica credit for that tip elsewhere. But that said at least two newer-ish members of the community learned something new.