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Interactive Infographics: The Next Step in Design Marketing?

| Web Design | No Comments

Infographics have gone through quite an evolution over the course of the last few years. In the beginning using pictures in an infographic at all was innovative, but now the Internet is full of them and people are getting bored. These days you have to do something extra to make your infographics standout among the rest. One of the primary ways to do this is through interactive and animated infographics.

Interactive Infographics: The Next Step in Design Marketing?

Maps Invite People in

One of the primary ways to make interactive infographics these days is with maps. This is because the interactive part is completely intuitive and doesn’t take a lot of effort on the part of the viewer. It also makes each infographic experience unique. If you live in Alaska and you want to know about pollution rates nearby to where you are, you probably don’t care nearly as much what they’re like in New York. There are many sites online that will help you do this such as Stat Silk.

Timelines Help you Focus in

There are also many timeline infographic sites out there as well such as Dipity. The Internet is full of a huge amount of information, and events that occur at different times through history are no exception. People who look at a timeline infographic may be interested in the broad strokes of how something happened, in which case they might only want to stay zoomed out and only read the big events in a huge amount of time. Or, alternatively, they may only care about what particular period in history.  By allowing users to focus in at a particular point in a timeline, such as the history of the catholic church, for example, you let them get only the information they want. If a student is doing a project on the Catholic church in the 14th century, for example, then they will only want to focus in at that part of the timeline. If you create a site with a timeline, you can appeal to a much wide swath of people and let them get the info they want without any extra noise. This is exactly what will draw in traffic.

Word Clouds Catch the People’s Attention

Word clouds are animated infographics that let you create size-weighted clouds of words based on any particular subject. So if people want to use their Facebook posts in a word cloud, they can use any site that uses these clouds to make it happen. They tend to be visually striking and very personal, which will always draw people in more than just a long endless essay on anything.  Sites like Tagxedo show how this is done to a strong degree.

Overall, the important thing is to make sure that you use interactive infographics appropriate for your situation. If you want a site that’s very serious, a word cloud may not be a good idea. If what you’re doing on your site has very little to do with geographic locations, then a map could just be distracting, for example.

Latest User Friendly Features in Facebook

| Social Media | No Comments

Social media networking sites have become a part of our daily lives and there is hardly a computer savvy that does not use some social media sites for connecting with people all over the world.

Particularly popular is Facebook, the darling of the young generation and today it boasts of millions of followers across the globe. People all over the world use it, connect with people from the remotest part of globe and use numerous interesting features offered by the site.

FacebookEvery Facebook user is given a timeline on their pages and this is used by them and others to post contents. However, until now posting promotional contents on it was not permissible. This prevented many aspirant entrepreneurs from using the Facebook features for promoting their business online.

As one of the trade journals describes, there is big news for aspirant entrepreneurs all over the world. Facebook now allows free promotional postings on timelines. “Huge news for businesses on Facebook! They’ve removed the requirement that all promotions on Facebook be run through an app.”

In the past use of promotions on the competitive as well as the promotions run on the timelines such as “like/comment/share this post for your chance to win” were against the approved guidelines of Facebook. Now that this constraint has been removed and such promotional postings is now permissible under the new regulations introduced by Facebook management.

An interesting fact about Facebook time line is that despite the restrictions imposed by it, companies often used to post promotional posts on the same. Basic reasons for such activities are as stated by one of the reviewers in the following words.

“Timeline competitions are easier to make, simpler to manage, and have more reach!”

While these facilities prompted some companies to use the Timeline for promoting their business there were also many that are law abiding and do not like to use black hat methods for business promotion of any type. Now these law abiding companies will now find it easier to make use of Timeline in Facebook for promotional posts. Many of them are looking forward to running such promotional ventures in near future.

However that is not all about the new features added by Facebook. Another important development is that Storify now supports posting to Facebook pages.

“Storify the service that lets people create stories by collating tweets and other online content, has added two useful features to allow users to add Google+ authorship to their Storify content, and post stories to a Facebook Page”, a report on the development narrates.

Recently a post appeared on the Storify blog that explains in some detail as to how the users of Facebook can calibrate their account. It also details the process of including Google+ authorship among others. In respect of the Facebook use, the blog offers a step-by-step guide for linking with Facebook page. The feature is open to all the Storify users.

Social media like Facebook has millions of followers and has huge potential for business promotion. The recent relaxations in its use could help business houses to make good use of the same and promote their business effectively.