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Breaking news: a picture tells a thousand words. Ok, so you maybe had that intelligence brief already. Here's the update on that story: Pictures get shared a thousand times more than words.
Fine, it's a slight exaggeration. But it is true that for most topics, posts with visuals get shared much more than ones without. And the ultimate visual post is, of course, the infographic. At BuzzSumo we analyzed 100 million articles to see what gets the most shares. What's the most popular type of content? The (erm) graphic says it all:
Proof, if you really needed it, that sharable infographics need to be at the core of your content marketing plan. This one on Ebola from the Washington Post is making some impact: 15k shares and counting.
In some ways they should be a total gimme in your content marketing playbook. You've already created insightful source content - a blog, report, guide. Making it visual is a freebie piece of content to out there to boost the signal. And now the downside: Unless you've got your art direction chops, they're not quick to produce. You need time and skills.
I know from personal experience that it's painful to get graphics pros - insourced or outsourced - to make infographics. They do a super job, of course - but it takes too long. They're busy. They're perfectionists. The story's over by the time it's out there. You need a more rapid response.
That's where Easel.ly makes a nice addition to your toolkit: infographics made fast and easy.
Let's see if I can get an infographic on how to make fast infographics done in an hour. And let's see if you can read it faster...
Like most graphic tools, you start by choosing a layout that suits you. They're sorted into several categories - a mix of topics (animals, science, sports) and formats (process, checklist, timeline). It's easiest (and fun) to have a poke around until you see something you think you can work with.
Nice to explore but we've only got an hour...
So let's look at the marketing ones:
A lot of options here. A bit of sub-categorisation by type might help with the search- marketing is a bit broad.
I want to create an infographic about good practice, I'm going to assume I'll find a decent template under 'checklist'. So here are my options:
Actually, there are lots more than this. But you get the idea.
I'm going to use the 'walkway' theme as my base. I could also freestyle and do my own. But I don't have time and the world's not ready for my original artwork just yet.
So here's my theme ready to be edited. You've got all the control you'd expect to have over text:
So here I am actually losing a little time - It's a bit fiddly to be honest. You can't edit the text directly, you need to do it in the editor and then publish to see what it looks like, which is a bit old school in a WSGIWYG world. Also the font choices are not in the named font, which is sort of weird.
But it's not that big a deal once you're used to it. I've dropped in my title and can do the usual font colour, size, opacity tweaks. Now I choose a banner from the object list from the top to drop in behind the title, good if somewhat short set of choices here.
It's a simple drag drop, resize, send to back routine. If you've been to PowerPoint, you know the drill. A little playing around with background image and text and we get to a reasonable place.
Into the detail now. Moving text and images around is very easy. If you want to find an image to help tell your story, use the objects drop down.
There's a library of images to drop in - not massively extensive but enough to get going. And you can upload your own images too. If you're doing something in any way unique, you're going to need to do this.
To move at speed I decided to stick with the general layout and tweak rather than invent or upload new images. Using the path / sign visuals already in the basic theme, it was very quick to start getting my content in place.
You can also drop in a range of charts including pie charts, bar charts, spider diagrams to help visualise data:
Charts need a bit of work though. They're a new feature, and good to have a range of options. But you need to create the labels yourself, or at least I couldn't figure out how to generate them from the input. Which isn't ideal in a hurry (this isn't real data by use of tool, just to show how to create a chart quickly). There also doesn't seem to be any color change options for the charts, so apologies for the splash of random in this one.
On we go, time's a wastin'. And on that subject - the cloning feature is quite handy for quickly replicating images or clusters you've already made.
Once you have it the way you want it, you can down load it as low or high quality jpeg or a PDF
You can then save it, and go back to your home page in Easel.ly to share your masterpiece (don't judge me because I did rush, and I'm no artist...)
If you work with others - for example in education - you can set up a group to view and share with each other. Useful if you've got a mini production line and you're helping each other out.
Overall - yes, you can make infographics fast with Easel.ly. And often, fast response to a trend is the name of the content marketer's game. It's got a few areas to improve in:
• No auto-save: always risky when working into a browser and things get fiddly.
• The charts are a bit limited in format
• The range of images - if you use it a lot, you will start running out, though no doubt there's more to be added
Minor quibbles aside, it's quite easy to use overall, you can definitely make infographics in less than an hour, and it's free. It won't make you the Picasso of data visualisation (if you find the app that does, do let us know) - but that's not what we're aiming for here. For quick and easy infographics, you should definitely check out Easel.ly.