In case you hadn’t noticed, infographics have become an increasingly popular way of displaying and sharing information over the Internet. In today’s blog post, we are going to discuss what it is about infographics that makes them so popular and how you can use them to help benefit your business.
Info-what?
First things first, an infographic, or information graphic, is quite simply a visual representation of information. This can be done in a variety of ways, such as by collating data into pie charts or graphs, by using tree diagrams and timelines or even just through pictures. Infographics usually contain smaller chunks of text, and rely more on images to get their information across.
So why do people like them?
Quick and easy
According to the Visual Teaching Alliance, 65% of people are visual learners; this means that they respond better when information is presented in a visual way, to how they’d respond if it were simply a text document or a list of figures. Following on from this, the human brain can process images more quickly than words, so an infographic is a much faster way of conveying information than say, a document is.
This infographic from Plaid Creative is a great example of how an infographic can be extremely simple but still convey a lot of information. Entitled “The Perfect Pour”, it shows the various different types of coffee and what goes into them. Textual information is kept to a minimum, but the pie-chart-style images are easy to understand.
Shareability
As a nation of Tweeters and Facebook users, we all love to share the cool stuff we’ve found on the Internet. An infographic, which is generally just an image, is very easy to pass on through social media platforms, and a good infographic can spread like wildfire.
Sharing = Links
Of course, when people start to share something, either through blog posts, shares on Facebook or Retweets, it generates more links, and therefore visitors, to your site.
Demonstrate your expertise
Remember how we said that a well-written, informative blog post can establish your position as a source of knowledge in your particular field? A well-produced, interesting infographic can do exactly the same thing, which is great because it means you can market yourself through an infographic, without actually doing all of that annoying self-promotion stuff.
We recently created this infographic for Archers Sleep Centre which was featured on their blog. The infographic provided visitors to the site with information about a variety things, from the pros and cons of memory foam, to the best tips for getting a good night’s sleep.
Try it yourself
So now that we’ve convinced you that you absolutely need to start producing some infographics, here’s a few simple things to remember to make the process a bit easier:
It’s an INFOgraphic
Remember that this is all about information, so make sure you use genuine facts and figures rather than opinions and ideas – an infographic should be an accurate portrayal of data, not just something based on guesswork.
This infographic, The Small Business Social Media Cheat Sheet, produced by Flowtown, gives a lot of information about the different social media sites and how small businesses can make use of them. Rather than adding their own thoughts and opinions on each site, the creators have simply stuck to the facts, so that the infographic remains informative and useful rather than confusing the reader.
Keep It Simple, Stupid!
Make a decision about the information you’re trying to get across and stick with that plan. You might find that once you start researching a subject, you discover far more information than you expected to. That’s great, but only use the relevant facts and figures – if you pack your infographic with more information than it needs, it kind of defeats the whole point. It’s supposed to be simple and easy to digest.
Make it fun!
An infographic that’s full of really useful information about a certain topic is a great way to guarantee shares, but even better is an infographic that presents useful information in a really fun or unique way. You can be really creative with an infographic, so make use of colour, illustrations and make sure that there’s some humour in there too!
Now what?
Once you’ve created your infographic, you need to get it out there! Add it to your site or blog and then use the Embed Code Generator from SEO Gadget to create a code that allows other people to add it to their sites. Visual.ly is a great site where visitors can search for and share thousands of infographics; if you upload yours to the site, you can tag it with relevant keywords so that users searching for a specific theme will (hopefully) find it! You can also submit it to infographic blogs and there’s plenty of those on the Internet! Here’s a few of our favourites:
- Cool Infographics
- The Infographics Showcase
- Daily Infographic
- Love Infographics
- Submit Infographics
- Infographics Archive
- Infographr
- I Heart Infographics
What do you think of infographics? If you’ve seen a really good example of one, share the love and tell us about it in the comments below!
