Today, we live in a visual society. More than ever before we are communicating to each other via pictures and videos. Social media sites like Facebook are full of photos being liked and shared. New sites like Instagram show up every day. What these sites all have in common is a focus on visual media in order to send a message.
Want to tap into the public’s willingness to look at pictures and share them with friends? Anyone that has a message worth getting out there should be using infographics.
What is an infographic?
An infographic is a chart or diagram that combines the facts that you’re trying to get across. With an appealing representation of that data. Trying to communicate a potentially complicated message? Having fun, bright visuals is a great way to break it down. And make it more attractive for your audience to read.
Infographics can be found anywhere nowadays. In blogs, online media, magazines or your physician’s office. No matter where you find them, the popularity of infographics as a method of data representation remains one of the best. It is derived from two words, ‘information’ and ‘graphics’. The term has become a kind of a buzz word popularized by many editorial platforms. To better understand the effectiveness and use of infographics, you will need to know the various types of infographics that exist. And how you can use them for higher engagements with your audience.
Types of Infographics
Although there are many other types of infographics, they generally fall under these three.
- Data Visualization – nowadays, the presentation of data has become an artistic science that involves a lot of consideration on aesthetics, visual patterns, and overall visual language. Data visualization simply means the use of graphics to present numbers and other data points. This improves data synthesis and results in the easier recall of important data.
- Information Design – information design focuses on the meticulous and graphical presentation of information which includes processes, chronology, and hierarchy. The only difference with data visualization is that it does not include data but information.
- Editorial Infographics – is the kind of representation used by major publications including charts, diagrams and other forms of illustration. Even though editorial infographics has existed for many decades before, it is now more visually appealing to encourage social sharing.
USA Today has been famous for featuring a small infographic in the bottom corner of its front page for years. But it’s just in the past few years that infographics have really taken off. At least as a primary eye-catching device on the internet. With that in mind, here are 3 important uses for infographics.
Get your message across in a way that’s easy to understand
Many companies and groups have important information that they want to get across to the public. But it can seem incredibly dry at times. If you want to let the public know how dangerous prescription drug addiction is, for example, you could simply list out the statistics on the number of people addicted to pain pills. And how many overdoses there are every year. You could do that, but it might be tiresome for readers.
A better way to get your piece the attention it deserves is to present those same statistics with bright, physical representations of the data. When your audience sees the number of pill addicts represented by rows of actual pills, they can quickly grasp what you’re trying to communicate.
Helping your audience share your message
Reaching a few people with your message is a start, but you probably want to reach out and get the whole world hearing what you have to say. One of the best ways to do that today is through an infographic that goes viral. If your infographic is interesting enough and eye-opening enough, your audience will want to share it with their friends. They may post it on Facebook or tweet it through Twitter, or even put it up on their own blogs and Tumblr pages.
The key to making an infographic that goes viral is to make it interesting enough to warrant sharing in the first place. Make sure that you present your content in such a way that anyone can be interested, and you’re already halfway home to creating content that will rocket across the internet.
Increasing traffic to your website
When you make a great infographic and post it on your site, other websites may notice it and start to link to your website in order to show it to their own audience. This helps you spread your own message in two ways. First is that it is connecting readers of other sites to yours, so they may start to become part of your audience, as well. The second way is that having more links to your site and more traffic will both raise the profile of your site in search engine rankings. That means that more people searching for the information they need will be directed to your site instead of elsewhere.
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