Are infographics useful for content writing services?  While appearing from the outset visually stimulating, can they be used as a part of a broad UK content marketing strategy?

The Rise of the Infographic

In 2010 the search term infographic was rated at just 1 in Google’s trend values, with 1 being the lowest and 100 being the highest.  Just 2 years later and it had hit the 100 mark.  Separate statistics show that the search term is entered 800% more than it was 2 years ago, and social media sharing site Digg has also reported that the numbers of infographics used on their site has multiplied by 250 since 2007.

A Picture Tells a Thousand Words

Technically, we could estimate the birth of the infographic being before the birth of social media, or even the internet or computers.  Ancient Cave paintings often portrayed information visually, much in the same way that an infographic is now capable of on our computers, which provided a primitive form of content writing services that informed and attracted attention to other cave men or ancient Egyptians.

Visual information proves popular because it is processed in a different way by our brains; half of our brain is dedicated to processing visual information.  Our brain is said to process visuals up to 60,000 times faster than text.  This also makes it easier to gain information from infographics due to the ease of processing visual information compared to reading text.  While engagement with content is a content marketer’s goal, they may see shorter engagement with infographics, but the message may be communicated quicker.

Trend: Novelty or Here to Stay?

Many trends hit the internet and don’t last long.  Many social media sites boomed for a year or so in the UK before fading such as Bebo or MySpace, which were never really a big part of content writing services strategies.  Trends like TheFitFinder are even shorter, in this case lasting only a few months in the UK during 2010’s university exams before Universities took exception to its content; anonymously sharing locations of people whenever you find some random stranger ‘fit’, and forced its closure.

Some however do stand the test of time.  It is hard to imagine an internet without Facebook or Twitter, and while these two social networks have hundreds of people working on keeping their networks fresh, they are unlikely to become irrelevant and a passing trend.

Picture Sharing

Infographics are slightly different however, as while there are no out and out dominant providers of infographics, there is significant growth in sites that can host them, and will excel from hosting them.  The rise of Pinterest and Instagram gives marketers an opportunity to utilise nothing but pictures in social media.  Infographics allow them the opportunity to put words and information into these images.

Breaking Barriers

Creating infographics is becoming easier as sites dedicated to the creation spring up.  Many offer templates and simple methods to create infographics that mean anyone can create an infographic for their specified purpose.   If your expertise is in content writing services and not graphic design, as long as you have the data sets relevant to your study in the UK, you can create a wide range infograms with templates that make it stand out from a plain text article.