Is the Use of Visual Content Appealing in Social Media?

Last week, I had come across this article in Search Engine Land about “Using Infographics in Social Media to Promote Content and Visualize Data” and it looked like a great topic to be discussing. Especially the word “Infographics” – does this method of communication have the potential to effectively illustrate a complex topic or opinion in the social media spectrum? Given that there is so much out there on Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon and other social media platforms, how can we start differentiating the cool stuff from the over-inflated text content?

Well before we discuss social media, let’s look at what is info-graphics? As suggested by Wikipedia, it is defined as:

“..visual representations of information, data or knowledge. These graphics are used where complex information needs to be explained quickly and clearly, such as in signs, maps, journalism, technical writing, and education.”

Source: Wikipedia – Information Graphics

This visual communication tool has been used for ages by scientists, mathematicians and statisticians to help convey conceptual information and as it is an image-based, it contains very little text. And as the saying goes, pictures speak a thousand words; so images used to visualise information can be an effective way to “make a point” with a bang! Especially if we are trying to demonstrate a complex concept, then using pictures should help users understand the message with ease.

Let’s look at some examples of what this looks like, especially in the social space.
Flickr would be good example of illustrating their Flickr User Model:

Secondly, an example about the level of user participation in the social media world by Forrester Research:

But info-graphics is not only images and can be taken a step further by animating them into video format. For instances, look at how the current Credit Crisis can be visualized:

See, even dry and complex information can be simplified with a few animated images. I found the video content quite interesting and self-explanatory but if it was put all in words then I’d probably stop reading it.

So this now brings us to seeing how info-graphics can be used in social media.

Well, we all know that social media users have a short attention span and will move on to the next piece of content if they don’t find your content interesting enough in the first few seconds. Hence using info-graphics can play an increasingly important role to hook the user in with the first glance. So it would be safe to say that using info-graphics will have a greater chance to become more viral and allow people to share your visual content with their networks, like the example above with the Credit Crisis video.

It might be worthwhile trying this out with your next blog post or social media post and see how many more “diggs” or “tweets” you get.

Anyway, to end, check out a few more examples of pretty good info-graphics content on Smashing Magazines and it might also be worthwhile reading up the article in Search Engine Land.

Tags: appealing content, infographics, social media, visual data