An infographic is a visual content that offers a lot of advantages. We are visual beings, and if instead of reading a long text for getting information, a single image with information is much easy to retain. And this is something that will definitely help an enterprise or a brand.
How to accomplish that an infographic will reach to other users
The simplest method and the best results it offers, is to share this information in social networks. If we have a company profile on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter or Google+, the most known social networks, it will be much easier for us.
There are social networks in which users are very predisposed to offer likes or to share interesting content. On the other hand, there are content formats that are the best examples, and one of those star formats are infographics.
What is the problem that many professionals have with this? They know that an infographic for social networks has a lot of repercussion, but they do not know which one is the correct way to share it.
How to make an infographic for Facebook
Let's take the example of Facebook, because it is the most known and used social network. The option that we would value in the first place would be, simply, to upload our infographic as if it were a photograph. In this way, it would be visible in our profile for all the users we authorize (if we have a private profile it would be visible only to our friends, and if it were public, it would be visible to any user of this social network).
What is the failure in this approach? That the format of our infographic will not allow it to be read clearly. You will see an elongated image, with a large white space on the margins and very far away, that no one will be able to read what you put in it.
Luckily, there are several options to load infographics on Facebook, so we can have some guidelines to promote this format correctly.
1. Share only one part of the image
One of the maxims when working with this type of visual elements, is that we should not share them completely. If we share only one a part we can make them read correctly and the rest of the users could understand them. Of course, we must choose carefully the portion that we are going to share, which should have value by itself.
The infographics should be placed on our website, our blog or some other page where they can be read easily and Facebook should be used as a vehicle to share them, but not for store them.
Dimensions of the images that we load
Whether they are square, horizontal or vertical images, Facebook will determine the dimensions you will use to display them.
- Squares: will look like a square of 470 pixels, so if the original image has less, it is possible that they will appear blurred or pixelated if it enlarges.
- Horizontal: will be in scale with 470 pixels wide. If the original image is smaller, it will be aligned to the left and with a blank space to the right.
- Vertical: will be in scale with 394 pixels high. If the original image is smaller, it will be aligned to the left and will add white space.
2. Add the link to the full image
We had talked about having the complete infographic on our website or blog. Why? Because no matter what direction we choose for the image, it is important that it must have that link. In this way we will be making users of the social network see that, if the image seems interesting, there is even more content if they follow the link.
3. Use a photo carousel
If in our image we have several parts that we would like to show, a carousel can be the best way. It is an interactive way that users can move from one image to another and also offers us the option to send them to our website when they click on one of the images.
4. Use the Canvas option
Canvas is one of the newest tools you can use on Facebook and one of the most customizable, although it is only displayed correctly in the app for mobile devices. It is an option designed for vertical images and we can add from a link to the page where we have hosted the infographic up to a button with a call to action.
In conclusion
One of the best advices we can offer is to share infographics more than once. Since we have dedicated a lot of time (together with our infographic company) to create them, we will make sure that the users of the different social networks can see them. For more information on how to share content several times, visit the Buffer blog.
Since we are going to select some parts of the infographic and we are not going to show it whole, we have the option of gradually teaching those different parts and getting the attention of the other users. Take advantage of it.
Any other thoughts or ideas to share infographics on Facebook? Comment with us!
