How To Get In On The "My Favorite Things" GIF Challenge On Instagram

Social distancing is a super effective strategy against the coronavirus, but it also might create more space in your daily schedule than you're used to. So why not use the free time to share some info with your friends, and help them get to know you better? Now that there are so many Instagram GIF challenges like "my favorite things," it's never been easier to play rapid fire ask-and-answer games.

The "My Favorite Things" and "Get To Know Me" GIF challenge templates have been created by a number of people on Instagram, including artist Martina Martian and designer Maddy Corbin. You can find them in saved Stories on those and other artists' feeds, or you might find them in your friends' Stories too. In addition to "My Favorite Things," other templates include "Women I Admire," "Daily Positivity Activity," and more.

Once you've decided on the Instagram template you want to use, press your thumb to the screen to "pause" the Story. When extraneous Instagram details fade away, screenshot that "My Favorite Things" template. If you screenshot a friend's template, it should go blank before time runs out on the slide, giving you time to capture it without their customized answers.

From there, simply go to your own Instagram Story and scroll up, so that you can see your photo library. You can also access your photos by pressing on the small square at the bottom right corner of your screen.

You should be able to see the template that you just screen-shotted in your photos, and select it for your own Story. From there, you can fit the challenge to the borders of your Instagram Story (or in whatever proportion you want — there are no rules here!). Once you've got your GIF challenge template in place, the fun part comes in: you get to pick the GIFs you want in each box.

To access GIFs for your Instagram Story, click on the square smiley face in the top right corner of your screen, and select the "GIF" button in the third row. From there, the world is your oyster. You can search for whatever type of GIF you want, whether it's an image of Spongebob Squarepants or your favorite neon phrase. You might not be able to find every single image that you want, to a T, but it's more than likely that you'll find all the GIFs you need to properly express yourself.

For each GIF you select, you can use your thumb and finger to scale size, and move it over whatever question bubble you want it to "answer." Keep repeating that process of searching for applicable GIFs until you've filled out all of the questions or topics in a template. Of course, you can also type in an answer if you can't find the right GIF. All you have to do is type onto the screen the way you normally would for an Instagram Story, and then scale the answer to the correct size with your fingers.

After you've filled out your "My Favorite Things" Instagram template and shared it to your Story, you might want to consider adding the blank template to your Story, too, so that friends can answer the same questions without searching through Instagram to find it. Once you and your friends have exhausted all the templates you can find, it might be time to make your own — or just move on to the next virtual trivia game night on Zoom.