Get Together

I was bored tonight and decided to make an Avatar for ~GetTogether (a group for german artists to organize devMeets - check it out!) so I came up with this one. It took ages since I haven't made any emotes before. I do have a little bit experience with creating gifs however - mostly from doing banners and avatars from movie screenshots - but this was something completely different. A lot of fun, but also a lot of work. My kudos to all the emoticon artists out there. I had to use so many frigging layers... but maybe I'm doing it wrong

Anyways, it's something about 35KB which makes it useless as an Avatar, so I'll probably have to use the non-animated version. Does anyone know how to make it smaller without reducing the actual size or quality (much)?