Would you rather read a two-paragraph-long caption on Facebook on financial planning, or look at a short and snappy, fun-looking infographic?

With dwindling attention spans and a constant demand for visually attractive content on social media, the popularity of infographics is at an all-time high. After all, readership rates are 80% higher when brands use visual elements like charts and graphs.

Related: Marketing Infographics: The Definitive Guide

Businesses and social media marketers are increasingly using infographics to not just attract their audience, but educate them in a fun way.

According to a report by the Content Marketing Institute, in 2020, 67% of B2B marketers created infographics and made it an essential part of their marketing strategies.

However, our 2020 visual content marketing statistics point out that 43% of marketers feel producing infographics and related visual content consistently is one of their biggest challenges.

This is where design tools like Venngage come in. With its user-friendly interface, short learning curve, and a variety of professional infographic templates, the Venngage Infographic Maker makes it easy for businesses to create visually-appealing infographics in minutes.

When creating infographics for social media, follow these 10 tips to grow your social media following and boost organic traffic to your site. By following these tips, we’ve actually grown our social media traffic by 300% on Twitter, 200% on LinkedIn, 150% on Pinterest and 100% on Facebook.

Click to jump ahead:

1. Share original facts

Creating viral content is no easy feat, but if you’d like to get press mentions, increase brand reach, and ensure your infographic gets a lot of shares and reposts, conduct original research.

Find out upcoming trends in your industry, get a quote from an industry influencer, debunk myths, and share original data.

2. Make sure the data you’re adding is relevant and recent

A lot of marketers end up quoting data that’s a decade old. Don’t make this mistake. When adding numbers, make sure they’re as recent as possible.

There are several ways to collect data for your infographic. Some of them include:

Use Google correctly

Refine your Google search. Instead of simply searching for household debt in 2020, add quotes (“household debt in 2020”) to search for this exact phrase.

Similarly, you can use minus sign ( – ) to exclude certain terms from your search.

Adding a data-specific file format to the end of your search term can further narrow down your search and find the data you’re looking for.

Go through existing data repositories

From Pew Research to The U.S. Government’s Open Data, there are a ton of data repositories available online that you can riffle through.

Whether you’re sourcing data through data scraping, surveys or any other means, the most important thing is to grab fresh data that no one has used before.

3. Make use of charts, graphs, and other visual elements

While text is an important part of an infographic, visuals are more so. Visual elements like pie charts, graphs, and different shapes make it easy for readers to scan the infographic.

These data visualization elements also greatly enhance comprehension of complex topics, and make key insights and important data memorable.

However, too much data can be overwhelming when shared on social media. Make sure you keep any charts or graphs you’re sharing fairly simple and valuable. Share only the most important data points and keep the rest of that data in your blog post.

Key takeaways: strike the right balance between text and visuals, and don’t overwhelm your audience with data.

4. Use the right images for different social media platforms

Did you know square images work best for Facebook, Instagram and Linkedin?

And longer ones perform best on Twitter and Pinterest?

Knowing the correct image format is essential when creating social media infographics. If you have a really long infographic, break it into multiple images before uploading as most platforms will auto-crop anything bigger than a poster-sized image.

You can find our recommended image requirements in our social media strategy post.

5. Craft an attention-grabbing headline

Grab the viewer’s attention instantly with a punchy headline. It’s the best way to make a good first impression and tell your audience what your infographic is all about.

With all the content noise on social media, you want to attract your audience instantly and entice them to read further.

Because of the limited space, it can be difficult to make a super eye-catching infographic header/title. But make sure you always have an informative one—do not include a list of graph or image without context.

Some tips to writing an informative, eye-catching headline are:

• Highlight a pain point or desire of your audience
• Make it short and sweet
• Add numbers where possible
• And, not only should the headline itself be strong, but its font, size and color should also distinguish it from the rest of the infographic.

6. Create a flow

The best infographics have a flow to them—they make it easy for viewers to follow along. You want to lead your audience’s eyes from one element to the other.

One great way of doing that is by adding visual flow elements like arrows, lines, and the like.

Splattering all the information in an incoherent way leads to confusion and chaos, and you definitely don’t want that. So always create a flow in your infographic for your audience to go through it easily.

7. Choose the right color scheme

Colors can easily make or break your infographic. Choosing the right colors can elevate your infographic.

Now, if you have brand colors to choose from and a design team to design your visuals, great! But if you’re new to this whole designing visuals job and you’re unsure which colors pair well together, you can always refer to the color wheel.

Related: Everything You Need to Know About Picking and Using Brand Colors

Some tips to help you make the best color choice:

• Experiment with different color schemes to see which looks best. You can go with analogous, complementary, triadic, or monochromatic color schemes.

Image Source

• Choose colors that make your text and visual elements pop on the background. A simple rule is to use light colors on a dark background, and dark colors on a lighter background.
• Explore templates if you’re a beginner. Venngage has 1,000+ templates to choose from, so if you’re just starting out, you don’t need to worry too much about the right colors or fonts.

Related: How to Pick Colors to Captivate Readers and Communicate Effectively

8. Choose the right fonts

Selecting the appropriate typeface for your infographic is essential. There are several things to keep in mind when selecting fonts for your infographic.

Number one is keeping it simple. An infographic is basically a visual summary of your content—so limit the text to the most important insights and data, only. Add short paragraphs and avoid complicated jargon.

Other tips include:

• The font should embody the character of your brand.
• The font should be legible. Choose a readable font for most of your text and increase the size of your main header, section headers and highlights significantly so that they pop.
• If you’re choosing two fonts, make sure they’re a little different from each other
• Decide if you want to go with serif or sans serif typeface
• Don’t use more than two fonts in your infographic

Related: Everything You Need to Know About Picking and Using Brand Fonts

9. Brand your infographic

Branding your infographic with your brand colors, fonts, logo, and URLs is crucial. Visuals, especially informational graphics like infographics, have the tendency to get shared by other content creators in your industry. And after all, consistent branding across all channels can increase revenue by 23%.

So by branding it, you’re making sure that along with your infographic, your brand reaches far and wide, too. This not only improves brand awareness on social media, but also establishes you as a thought leader in your industry. This improved status makes it easy for you to establish relationships with influencers and top industry blogs.

10. Use white space strategically

White space, or negative space as it’s known in the design world, is a very important element of a professional-looking and aesthetically pleasing infographic.

Don’t fill the entire graphic with visuals or text—leave some negative space to separate visuals and text. Incorporate margins and spacings between your elements so they look good together.

Embrace the negative space in your design.

Social media infographic FAQ

Have more questions? Let’s answer them!

1. What is a social media infographic?

A social media infographic presents information visually in the form of pie charts, graphs, and other visual elements.

2. Why use infographics for social media?

Social media platforms thrive on visual content.

Visuals, like infographics and the likes, receive more engagement and shares on social media. This is why, when we conducted our research, 74% of marketers stated that 70% of their content contained some kind of visual.

Infographics also make educational and informational content fun and easy to digest. Because let’s face it, you have to sell on social media too. It’s not all fun and games for you, right?

So using infographics on social media makes it easy for business owners to present complicated, but useful, information in an interesting way.

3. How do you make an infographic for social media?

There are several ways to make an infographic for social media. If you’re a seasoned designer, tools like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator are your best options.

However, the average marketer or business owner is better off using an online design tool like Venngage, which makes it easy to create stunning infographics.

4. What makes a social media infographic successful?

A successful social media infographic is one that instantly captures attention and presents information in an easy-to-digest and visually appealing way. It tells a story, through both its data and visual elements.

Because of its design and content, a successful social media infographic has the power to go viral.

5. How do I make my infographic go viral?

The best way to make your infographic go viral is by creating an infographic that instantly captures your audience’s attention and compels them to read it. The more aesthetically pleasing your infographic is, the more chances it will go viral. So infographics with great data visualizations, interesting layout, eye-catching color schemes, and great font selection will triumph.

Secondly, try to add important viral-worthy information to it. Don’t add boring facts that you can find everywhere. Add numbers, data, interesting bits of information. Mention quotes by influencers and industry leaders in your infographic, email it to them and tag them on social media, so they’re likely to share it with their circle, too. Original research is hugely compelling, too, and increases the chances of it going viral.

And lastly, promote it on social media. Use a mix of organic and paid social media advertisements to help it reach far and wide.

6. Where can I design infographics for social media?

Tools like Venngage make it infinitely easier for busy business owners and marketers to create social media infographics. With templates for every industry and a simple drag-and-drop editor, even marketers with zero designing sense or minimum budgets can create amazing infographics easily.

In summary:

Designing aesthetically pleasing visuals like social media infographics can seem like a daunting task. There are fonts to choose, and color schemes to decide on. Which elements go well together? How to compress information to add to the infographic? How to create the right infographic for different social media platforms?

There’s a lot to decide and work on.

And you can’t afford to skip them because we’re headed towards an increasingly visual digital world.

Our best tip is to keep your social media infographics consistent. Share consistently and keep the branding and quality of the content consistent, too. And make sure your social media infographics are always consistent with your mission or goals.

Want to make your own social media infographics? Start creating in seconds with our professional templates and simple online editor.