Is it just me or has everyone recently discovered infographics? I am used to seeing simple graphs, tables and pie charts popping up here and there when reading informational articles that contain statistics but it seems that recently, many individuals have turned to the use of infographics in order to draw more attention to their topic. These reader friendly “pictures” are now making what could be potentially boring information easier to read but does this mean less solid information and more visuals for the reader in the future?

The social media industry has now also taken on the use of infographics in order to engage customers with statistics and facts as well as involve readers with the article itself. One infographic that got an extremely popular response was the Mega Shark. This simple graph is based on a so-bad-it’s-funny B grade film and looks at the possibility of a shark eating a plane. A brilliant form of satire, this infographic is informative and highly humourous.

megashark eats plane

As we all know, readers come to a site, scan the content and leave. In the instance of having an infographic embedded within your article, the colours and shapes grab the user’s attention, and in many cases, readers will hover over the Infographics before reading on, or sometimes even scroll down to the image and leave the page before reading anything else.

Infographics are being used to visually stimulate readers and provide them with more than simply black text on a white page. They prove as a much needed break for many readers who sometimes only come across pages and pages of content with no visual break

Infographics can also convey a large amount of information in a confined space – so instead of scrolling down a list of numbers and percentages, you can merely see what you need straight away. Something like the Facebook Factbook has a vast amount of information, but all of the information is supplied in a simple and compact form.

factbook

People in the know suggest that you use infographics when you have lots of amount of information that might possibly come across as boring or a bit of an fact overload. When looking at infographics from an SEO point of view, this pretty picture has its ups and downs. Obviously Google likes words as opposed to images, but the potential to make your infographics viral is more likely, so a good combination of words and images or infographics is probably best.

The way I see it, infographics could go two ways. They could enhance the quality of content and really boost the appeal of articles that were once thought to be too boring or long to read and give them access to the “cool” factor..Or, infographics could enhance the laziness of the already apathetic reader, making it harder for individuals who write text only pieces to catch a break. You decide.

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