Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Sure, articles let brands talk directly to customers about solving problems, like how to save for a home while paying off student loans, for example. Blog posts have relatively low overhead compared to, say, a national ad campaign or video product release, and in some industries such as finance, they are necessary to edge out competitors trying to capture the same audience.

But a content plan with only blog posts is like a diet that consists solely of bananas. Sure they provide some value and it’s safe to eat one per day, but without diversity you’re going to become malnourished.

The problem for many brands is they don’t have the data to justify alternative approaches that may cost more than a 600-word article.

When our data scientists examined 3,200 stories produced on the Contently platform over the last year, they found that a different type of content outperforms blog posts across most industries:

- Infographics reach 54 percent more readers than blog posts.

- The median cost to reach one reader for an infographic was $0.04 versus $1.77 for a blog post.

-Infographics have a 73 percent completion rate. Blog posts have a 66 percent completion rate....

What makes people want to share an infographic?

Is it a certain color scheme that catches the eye? Do certain formats work better than others? Or, in the end, is it all about the content? At Visme, we set out to answer these questions by performing a content analysis of the most shared infographics on social media.

Using BuzzSumo, we identified every infographic with more than 5,000 shares across some major social media platforms -- Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ -- and analyzed them for different characteristics. Those were things like word count, size, colors used, format, and topic.

Here's what we found after analyzing over 200 infographics -- and takeaways on how you can apply these insights to your own infographics, making them more shareable....