Following the recent success of the “Where Does Your Tax Go?” app for Publicpolicy.ie (15,000 views in 2 days), I’m sharing my top 5 tips on what makes a good and sharable infographic.
5 Steps To Great Infographics
- Everything you will ever read on infographics starts by saying it’s all about the content. And that is most definitely the case. It’s all about the content! (Luckily when you’re dealing with a client like publicpolicy.ie – an independent think tank on policy issues – good content comes with the territory!) It helps if your data works on more than just one level, ie. instead of just having one message, it’s got more than one. In my opinion, that should be a sign for you that you need an infographic, because otherwise it’s just a graphic.
- Allow yourself plenty of time to create the image. You might consider using a data visualisation tool like GetBulb. We didn’t in this case, but now that we have our logins, you can expect to see much more of this kind of thing from us in the future.
- If you’re running WordPress, install the Embed Code Generator plugin to create the embed code that people can use to republish your graphic. That really takes the pain out of setting up.
- Brief your PR people and have them ready to seed it out. Success is measured less on page views on your own site, and more of page views on host sites. Try and find out from the media outlets that publish it how many page views were achieved. Our score above does not include independent.ie. While the infographic was posted there as part of the Budget analysis, it was part of a slider with other content, so it was not possible to isolate the views on just ours.
- Finally, get on Twitter. If your timing is right, people should be talking about the subject of your infographic. You need to get on and join in the many conversations already taking place. Use Advanced Twitter search. Success on Twitter in this instance is measured by number of RT’s and stars you get from people who don’t already know you.
