Sex No Longer Sells - What Works And Fails When It Comes To Infographics

May 29th 2012

An experimental website set up to look at the impact and influence of the growing trend of infographics has discovered that sex no longer sells in terms of the most popular online content to drive traffic to a website. In contrast, mentioning Apple, Facebook or Twitter in an infographic is the key to success.

Research from the team behind BestInfographic.co.uk shows that mentioning Apple, Facebook or Twitter in an infographic is the key to success, as is a bright colour scheme, whilst avoiding sexual topics is a must. Also, the best performing social platforms in terms of sharing infographics and driving traffic to the site were, in this order, Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook and then Google Plus.

Since the site's launch in January, it has had more than 245,500 unique users. The top 5 most popular include infographics on technology, drugs and geeks, but the most popular theme was infographics that surrounded coffee.

www.BestInfographic.co.uk was set up in January 2012 as an experiment site by 10 Yetis Public Relations and its sister company aSocialMediaAgency.com, to look at the growing trend of digital agencies and brands using infographics to raise awareness of their products or services and drive traffic and links to websites.

Agencies and companies are encouraged to submit their infographics to the site and it has now had more than 200 submitted since its launch.

The team behind it used the 200 milestone to take a closer look at what style of infographics work the best and this is where it was discovered that sex related infographics are not the best performing in terms of link building, traffic driving or share-ability.

Despite the fact that the team's initial belief was that sex themed infographics would perform best, they didn’t feature in the top 10 most visited or shared pages.

The most viewed infographic on the site to date focuses on the health benefits of Coffee vs. Tea, made by the people over at Policy Expert.

The team's analysis showed that the best performing infographics relate to three key factors:

Subject - Some of the site's best-read infographics focus on a strong subject topic, with the ones doing best focusing on brands. Infographics on Apple, Facebook and Twitter always do well.

Design - All of the top 5 infographics have a quality design, clear use of colour and great copy. They communicate big or confusing data in a simple and clear-to-understand way

Length - All of the most popular infographics are around the same length. Too short and they look flimsy; too long and they lose readers' interest.

Speaking about the research, Andy Barr of 10 Yetis Public Relations Agency said,

The growth in the use of infographics over the last two years has been the main driver behind our deciding to set up and explore how agencies and brands use them. I was hugely surprised to see that sex related infographics are not the best performing ones, but maybe this is more to do with peoples' attitudes towards sharing them.

He continued, "The use of infographics is getting more interesting, as both the public relations and Search Engine Optimisation communities are keen to deploy them, due to their ability to drive traffic to sites, attract higher quality links to client sites and, of course, communicate complicated data stories in a simple way. With the debate about the PR and SEO crossover of linkbuilding raging, infographics are playing an interesting part."

The Most Popular, top 5, infographics to feature on Bestinfographic.co.uk are: