It seems that not a day goes by when there isn’t a new one released. The topics range from the history of major acquisitions made by Google to the rise of social Food Trucks to the body count of Jason Voorhees. The data is fascinating. The designs are visually striking. And over the past four years, their frequency has increased by 30 percent around the world, with an average of 16,913 mentions every day.
They’re infographics, and many are fueled by social media analytics. Hop on over to Twitter and search #infographic to see for yourself. You’ll find literally hundreds, if not thousands, of links to different infographics every day. It’s gotten to the point now where they’ve become expected parts of any successful publication or PR strategy, be it in print or online. Magazines like Wired, GOOD, and Inc. have at least one new infographic in every issue. Fast Company does the same thing, on top of their Infographic of the Day section on their website.
So what exactly is it that makes these things so popular?
1) Variety
The breadth of topics covered by infographics is large enough to please just about anyone. No matter your interest, field of expertise, or even passing curiosity, chances are someone has made a visual representation of that information. Trendspottr keeps a running tab so you can see the most popular infographic topics around the web at any given time.
2) Ease of Skimming
Blame MTV, video games or any other evil attention span killer. The fact remains that most people, when given the chance, would rather not read about numbers and statistics. Add to that our collective ADD from the information overload being thrown at us every day, and the fact that 65 percent of the population are visual learners (according to the Visual Teaching Alliance). Impressively designed infographics make it not only easier to digest such otherwise heady information, but it makes it fun, too.
3) Shareability
Infographics are a great platform for marketing and spreading relevant information like social media analytics around. That’s why they are so frequently shared. 89 percent of infographics can be found in microblogs like Twitter and 11 percent in blogs and other websites.
4) DIY
Now anyone can make their own infographic. Programs like Wordle let you create your own dynamic word cloud, adding a cool text element to your image-heavy graphic. Visual.ly is a website that (soon) will build entire graphics for you. All they need is the data. There’s also an iPhone app called Photo Stats App that turns your personal pictures into data-filled infographics. Even resumes are incorporating them. Visme.co is a site that imports your LinkedIn info and converts it into a custom infographic.
As infographics continue to boom in popularity, and you likely start creating your own, try not to simply add to the white noise of data-driven design. When making an infographic, make sure it’s relevant (or at least entertaining) information, well thought out, well designed, and well circulated. And, make sure you get your data from easy to use analytics tools like GMG client Infegy, provider of Social Radar.
Those were a lot of words we just threw at you so to reward your diligence in reading this entire post, we present you yet another infographic, this time about….infographics!
Like the graphic? Our awesome creative team built this with data gathered from Social Radar.