Way back in 2010 the success of the relatively new infographic format was already creating unprecedented levels of traffic websites to that embraced the medium.
Spring forward to today and it seems every man and his parrot has created an infographic. So is the format still working or is it yesterday’s news?
Infographics are a simple, eye catching medium that merge data, design and copy in an appealing and visual way to explain and highlight a subject in more detail, attract backlinks and grow the profile of the business that created it.
For example, Word Stream, an internet marketing company, decided to dabble into the world of infographics and find out just exactly how successful they are. Their infographic went viral, creating a phenomenal amount of natural traffic to their site. Infographic, click here.
So has the role of the infographic changed in two years?
It was widely believed that that by using lots of keyword anchor text on your site you would gain better positions on search engines. However with Google’s latest algorithm updates this is no longer the case, you can now, in fact, actually be penalised for keyword saturation.
This means that it has never been more important to provide your viewers with interesting and appropriate content.
Infographics come under this umbrella and are an important part of a SEO strategy that don’t get affected by algorithm updates.
And they’re not just useful for SEO. By using Infographics in your social media campaigns it can help to build a successful social marketing strategy.
But how, what makes a social marketing campaign a success? Success in social media marketing can measured on how quickly your web content reaches the maximum number of people.
But how does your content get shared on social media?
When surveyed a wide variety of people stated that most of them shared content on social media sites, and again the wide majority of what was shared was images across all sites. Images in general spread more quickly.
And with infographics marrying the best of both ie images and content, you can imagine the possibilities of utilising infographics to build your social networks.
Further evidence that graphics and images are booming online is the incredible rise of Pinterest.
Pinterest is the new boy on the block in terms of social media site; it was recently ranked #1 for sending referral traffic to websites and #3 among the top social networks. And because you can share your infographic as an image you can Pin it on Pinterest which makes it 5 times more visible compared to other images promoted on the site.
What is important to note is that infographics are linked to blogs, they are shared through social bookmarking and mentioned in discussion forums more often than any other type of content and this is essentially because of their visually stimulating and engaging design.
By publishing your infographic on your own blog, website, Facebook page, twitter profile, the Google+ page and Pinterest, you are going for maximum exposure, with the idea of generating the biggest buzz possible. Once this has been accomplished providing you have chosen a highly prominent topic, sit back and watch your infographic go viral over social media.