Social Media Marketing, Branding and SEO For 2012 – Infographics add to the top of the list

Infographics are multi performers

Back in January we published a news article about preparing yourselves for social media marketing in 2012. Based on the statistics and our own experience we framed a social media marketing schedule and a strategy. We advised you to have active and regular presence in Facebook, Google plus, twitter and 10 more social media sites that you can pick based on your target audience. Maintenance of Facebook, Google Plus and twitter with daily update posting was the top of the list back then. Now we are half way into 2012 and we have a new strategy to be added to the top of the list. This strategy is not a new concept but has been overlooked through all these years. It’s infographic promotion that we are talking about. The success of infographic promotion was proven back in 2010 when a case study reported the success of their infographic going viral and getting brand exposure through link backs from authority sites such as CNN and New York Times. We all know search engine algorithms and social media trends have changed a lot through 2010 to 2012 and so can the Infographics produce the same results today?

Changes in Google algorithm made infographic promotion indispensable
When framing the SEO strategies, we always have a big question in our mind: “What if the strategy backfires in future?” Google once strongly recommended the use of keyword anchor tags and now their algorithm penalizes sites that used keyword anchor texts heavily no matter the nature of their link building strategy.  In addition to that Google bots are now hungry for natural links. According to SEO Roundtable, “it is not about link building that "looks" natural but your links really have to be natural.” People won’t naturally link back to your site or refer to your site unless you don’t present them with something interesting to share. Now remember what we told about the case study where a company got links back from CNN and NY Times using an infographic? Obviously the strategy behind infographic promotion is that, we present the online world with something really interesting and easy to share. Depending on the catchiness of the infographic you would get referrals and links back NATURALLY from all the top guns.

We had published another news post about the panda and penguin update scare, where it was explained that you have to overcome Google update challenges and focus your SEO on a long term basis. Infographics are the integral part of such a SEO strategy that never gets affected by any algorithm update.

Social Media Marketing – Most Shares, Pinterest promotion, blog mentions – Infographics can do a lot  

When do you call your social media marketing strategy a success? According to me, success in social media marketing is when your social media activities reach the maximum number of people within a very short time. According to research on most shared content in social media, images occupy the top spot. As a facebook user I always tend to share interesting graphics most of the time. Infographics carry a lot more information than the actual images that are spreading like a wildfire in the social media. If tiny images can spread virally, imagine the power of full length Infographics filled with information.

Pinterest has been the hot news around the social media marketing sphere. Pinterest was ranked #1 to send referral traffic to the websites. Recently the website ranked #3 among the top social networks. Everyone know Pinterest has a lot of potential to promote their websites but only a few know how! Pinterest works on the image sharing concept and obviously the strategy needs to be visual optimization of your content. Check out the screenshot below. You could see a “full length infographic” highlighting among the rest of the images. The visibility of the infographic is 5X more compared to the other images. This is proven with most our own Infographics pinned by more than 50 unique users naturally



Now are you beginning to get a picture on how Infographics are effective for Pinterest promotion?

Infographics are syndicated to blogs, shared through social bookmarking and mentioned in discussion forums more often than any other type of content. The most important thing to note here is that, all these would happen NATURALLY. All you have to do is, publish the infographic in your own blog, website, facebook page, twitter profile, the G+ page and Pinterest. Once this is done you could sit back and watch the infographic go viral over the social media. For additional coverage you could syndicate your infographic to the best infographic sites as well.

Not just backlinks and traffic: The Real power of Infographics is in “Branding”

The effectiveness of infographic promotion doesn’t end with getting quality backlinks, a flow of traffic and unique social media signals. The Infographics offer huge real estate to highlight your brand. By branding the graphic with your logo and information, your brand gets popular each time it is spread in the social media or found in the search or referred from the top sources such as the CNN and NY Times. In fact, Infographics would take your brand to heights which you’d have never imagined to reach

Whatsoever, no shortcut to success
There is a common misconception that the concept of Infographics can be used as a shortcut to effective promotion. Many think they could just copy the content from everywhere and make it as an infographic and evade Google’s eyes as the search engine bots cannot index the text in the images. So the content will not be flagged as spam. It is true that search engine bots will not sense it, but if you use random copied content without any research, you cannot dream of any of the above mentioned social sharing, or syndication or referrals from tops sites to happen. Because humans could identify quality of the information. If none of that happens, your infographic would be residing within your circle and will not get the light of the entire online world. Being that said, you would be wasting your time in designing the infographic.

So if you realize the real potential of infographic promotion, you have to do hard work in researching for information and presenting it right with great infographic designs. Remember: “One picture is always worth a thousand words”!