sharing infographics mobile

How to Use Infographics in Social Media

If you’ve scrolled through your Facebook News Feed recently, you’ve probably noticed that visuals take up a lot more space—and attract a lot more attention—than text-only updates. There’s a reason that Facebook has become increasingly visual-centric, and why imaged-based social media platforms like Instagram and Pinterest have become so popular.

Social media users engage with images significantly more than text-only posts. In fact, images on Facebook get 200% more Likes than text updates or links, and Tweets with images receive 150% more retweets than those without. That means that if you want to both convey important information and get your social media audience to pay attention to what you have to say, the infographic is going to be one of your most powerful tools.

I’ve written before about how to create an engaging infographic and the many different platforms you can use to share infographics—ranging from infographic directories to your own blog to press releases—but today I want to look specifically at how you can get the most out of posting infographics on social media.

Tease the Release of Your Infographic

Before you even unveil your infographic on social media, you can extend your mileage by doing a slow rollout. What does this mean? If you’re sharing a series of facts in your infographic, you can release one fact at a time as updates on Facebook and Twitter (infographic facts make particularly good Tweets). Each fact should include a link back to the infographic on your website, and when you’ve released all the facts separately, you can release the infographic on social media.

Optimize Your Infographic for All Screen Sizes

According to Visual.ly, 81% of all infographics are vertical (meaning they have a portrait orientation), and most vertical images have a standard width somewhere between 600-1100 pixels. Unfortunately, not every social media platform and screen size is going to work perfectly with your vertical image, especially considering that some people may be looking at your infographic on a mobile device.

In order to make sure your infographic looks its best on all screen sizes, consider using a tool like PlaceIt, which resizes images as screenshots on mobile devices, or the aptly named Social Image Resizer Tool, which lets you adjust your infographic to the dimensions of standard images on all the major social media sites.

Pay Attention to Your Release Time

Do your research on the social media platforms you’re using and the best times of day and days of the week to release an infographic. Engagement on each platform is different, so to get the most out of your infographic, release it at the optimal time on each platform. Because many people use Facebook on their mobile devices and tend to check their phones first thing in the morning, between 6-8 am on weekdays is one of the best times to post. Twitter and Pinterest, however, both see more engagement during the daytime on the weekend.

If you want to schedule your infographic to roll out at different times on different sites, try using Hootsuite, which allows you to schedule updates across social media platforms from one dashboard.

Go Beyond Facebook and Twitter

While Facebook and Twitter still dominate the social media sphere, you should also consider releasing your infographic on:

Pinterest. This photo pinning site has over 70 million active users and is an ideal place for any type of visually appealing content. Its users are predominantly female and most are in the 25-34 age range, so if this is your target market, you should definitely share your infographics here.

Tumblr. Tumblr bills itself as a microblogging site that favors short posts and visual content over in-depth articles, and it features a re-post function that allows users to quickly share content they like with their own Tumbler blog followers. It’s particularly popular with teens and young adults, and its users tend to spend more time on the site than they do on platforms like Facebook.

Flickr. While Flickr isn’t as commonly used for social networking as the sites above, it is an incredibly popular photo database site, and sharing your infographic here with a link back to your website can help you drive traffic.

StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon is a site that lets users select their interests from a list, and then recommends sites, videos, and images for each person. Because the recommendations are based on interests, having your infographic included on StumbleUpon could be a great way to drive high-quality traffic to your site. Know that if you decide to promote your infographic on this social platform, you will have to pay a standard fee of $0.10 for every Stumble.

Test and Try Again

If you’re new to sharing infographics on social media, use the first try as a learning experience. Look at your metrics for each social media site and pay attention to where and when you got the most engagement. Take that into consideration when planning your new infographic release and you’ll get more out of it.

2 thoughts on “How to Use Infographics in Social Media”

  1. I don’t have perfect idea on Infographics.And am also new to the Social Media field.This post can really help to get the knowledge on these important things and hope i can get best from this.

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