Twitter now officially supports animated GIFs in addition to pictures, videos, and texts.

The announcement came June 18 from Twitter. “Starting today, you can share and view animated GIFs on http://Twitter.com on Android and iPhone.

It quickly became a trending topic with thousands of tweets and GIFs hitting the Web.

A short text and animated GIFs can go a long way in helping small businesses market their brands. They’re a fun and innovative way for brands to connect with their audiences in the era of social media platforms.

Take a look at how companies including Netflix, Wendy’s, and Nickleodeon wasted no time in jumping in on the action using the new GIFs ability to market their products and brands.

While GIFs have been supported on the service, it required users to go through a third-party platform. With the update, you can bypass that completely and upload GIFs directly from all of your devices.

Brianhonigman.com offers ways to effectively market your small business using GIFs. Some of them include:

1. Help incorporate your brand offerings effectively: Look to create GIFs that sync with your campaigns, as well as your consistent product or service offerings.

2. Work with influencers to help create content and increase reach: Reach out to influencers that are actively creating their own GIFs and appear to have a loyal following. You can collaborate with them to create content for your brand that’s in line with their style and they’ll feel comfortable reblogging to their own audiences.

3. Repurposing your best content: Turning content from past events or commercials into GIFs can give the content a second life for another interested audience.

4. Creating educational content about your brand: Your GIFs should be both fun and educational to ensure there is an added incentive for your audiences to share them with their networks.

5. Curating the content of others: One way of encouraging users to create GIFs about your brand is to hold a contest.

You can also check out examples of how other companies are using the new GIFs functions at Entrepreneur.com.