5 Key Elements of Viral Content

Mark Smiciklas from Intersection Consulting and author of The Power of Infographics, designed this helpful infographic The Five Key Elements of Viral Content.

The goal of every content marketer is to have his/her information shared across digital channels by their audiences. This is often easier said than done. What factors contribute to people sharing the content they consume online?

In researching the content for this infographic I came across a post in my Delicious archive that helps answer this question. Leo Widrich over on the Buffer Blog wrote a great post about what makes content spread. In it, he analyzes some of the elements that helped one particular blog post get over half a million likes. He also references an interesting research paper about what makes online content go viral.

This infographic highlights five key elements of viral content: scarcity, share buttons, skim-ability, practical utility and consistency. Are there any others you would add? The comments are yours.

Originally posted on Social Media Explorer

I would like to see the URL links to the sources and to the infographic landing page in the footer of the design so they travel with the infographic image as it gets shared across the Internet.

SEO & Infographics - an Interview with Eric Enge

Eric Enge, Author and SEO GuruRecently, I had an amazing opportunity to interview Eric Enge about SEO & Infographics.  Eric has incredible insight in the world of SEO as a consultant, author, speaker and entrepreneur.

Eric Enge is the CEO of Stone Temple Consulting, a consulting company that provides a full range of Internet marketing optimization services including: strategic business planning, on page search engine optimization, link building, content optimization, conversion optimization, social media optimization, user engagement, and pay-per-click campaign development and optimization. Eric is co-author of the book The Art of SEO, a speaker at numerous search marketing events, and a contributing author to Search Engine Land, Search Engine Watch, and SEOmoz. 

 The interview covers some of the hottest topics that impact the infographics design industry today:

• Infographics as part of a content marketing strategy
• How Google’s changes to their algorithm impacts infographics
• Infographics relevance and accuracy
• Using attribution links, anchor text and embed code for infographics
• Infographics on Pinterest 

You can read the complete interview on the InfoNewt blog

Facebook's Secret Strategy Infographic

Art: Audrey Fukuman

There was some controversy when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unintentionally revealed the 2010 Facebook Strategy Infographic that was printed on the inside liner of his hoodie at the D8 conference.  Audrey Fukuman at SFWeekly.com has recreated the infographic based on the video and photos.

Photo via AllThingsD/Anna Mathat

According to SFWeekly.com, this was a hoodie given to all Facebook employees.

I expect some disagreement, but I’m a firm believer that you can absolutely design an infographic to represent a strategy, a concept or a qualitative result.  Infographics don’t have to be based only on a massive amount of quantitative, numeric data.  What do you think, does this qualify as an infographic?

Here’s the video clip from the AllThingsD D8 conference when Mark removed the hoodie and revealed the graphic:

Found on SFWeekly.com and digg.com