There are hundreds of blog posts online about how infographics are great for your content marketing strategy, and why visual content is the way to go. But people already understand that, and certainly don’t need another article entitled “10 Reasons to Incorporate Infographics into your Social Media Campaign”. It’s just so overdone. Infographics have a lot more potential aside from simply providing people with a visual representation of data. In fact, infographics can also make use of interactive elements. Even though people are aware that interactive infographics exist, they are hardly making use of these exciting, and beneficial features.
In Venngage, there are a number of interactive widgets available that can be integrated into an infographic. These widgets include embedded videos, polls, forms, links and hover windows. These components aren’t just there to take up space. They exist because they are factors that can make your infographic a source of curation, conversion and retention. In this series of posts, you will learn how to use the interactive elements to their full potential. This first article of the series will explain to you not only how to use polls in your infographic, but the benefits that come with using them.
What are Polls?
Polls, in the simplest terms, are multiple choice questionnaires. A poll allows a user to ask a group of people a single question in order to acquire data on the user group’s preference of a particular subject. In this example, a poll is used to not only promote engagement among readers, but also to acquire data on the readers’ preferred twitter strategy by the organization listed. Based off of the results from this simple poll, you can discern that Denny’s has the most liked Twitter feed.
How do I use polls in Venngage?
Just like all the widgets in Venngage, the poll widget simply needs to be dragged and dropped into the editing canvas. You can then customize the question you would like to ask, the answer choices available, as well as the type and style of graph you would like to have your results displayed on. Furthermore, polls are a great addition to process or list based infographics in order to get an opinion on a specific topic presented in the infographic. Make sure that you embed the infographic that includes your poll so that people can actually engage with it. It will not be interactive if you download the infographic as a PNG or PDF from your Premium account.
Why should I use polls in my Infographic?
Aside from gaining great insight on the needs of your users and your readers, polls are also an excellent way to promote engagement with your content. By participating and interacting with your infographic, people have a higher tendency to retain the information presented. Using the data acquired from the polls, you can then easily produce statistical infographics, and present the data points in visually engaging charts to justify a previous hypothesis or opinion. Also, you can use the data acquired to shape the type of content you create in the future, and the method for doing so. Take the above example where the results from the poll demonstrated that Denny’s had the preferred Twitter account. From this data, you can further analyze Denny’s marketing strategy by looking at the type of posts they tweet, the frequency of their tweets and the range of their tweets. In fact, you can keep making poll after poll to continuously narrow down the type of data you acquire.
Take this poll for example: (go ahead and submit your opinions or click the Example Links for a preview)
This is a great example of a poll that can greatly benefit a company’s ability to engage and retain their users. By asking people the type of content they want to see, you have the opportunity to give your readers exactly what it is they want more of. By doing so, not only are your subscribers happy because they are getting information they actually care about, but you’re happy because your views and shares are more likely to increase. Using the data acquired from this poll, we could create another one to gain further insight on the type of subjects you like most, the length of the article, the amount of picture in the article, etc. This is similar to what we did when analyzing what Pinterest infographics performed best, however the method of using polls results in more specific, and user-generated input.
Now that you know how to use polls in your infographics, you can start using them to survey your users about their needs and desires. If you have any questions, or just feel like sharing your creations, feel free to comment on this post!