Recovery Month's New Media Newsletter for June

Infographics

June June 2012 Recovery Month Toolkit: Using Infographics to Tell the Story Over the past few years, infographics have become an increasingly popular tool to grab the attention of readers and portray complex ideas, information, and data in a simple way. In the 24-hour news cycle where information is so easy to access, infographics are designed to distill overwhelming text and statistics into simple ideas and images that readers can quickly understand. Infographics add personality to flat numbers and statistics. Including photos, symbols, and other images that resonate with an audience entices people to continue reading. Displaying information in a visual manner also encourages sharing. Because social media platforms and news outlets rely so heavily on visual imagery, infographics can widen the reach of this information. Bloggers, reporters, and even the average reader may decide to share these visuals with their networks through social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. This year, Recovery Month developed a series of infographics to illustrate the message of recovery through its 2012 Toolkit. Given that there are many interesting statistics about the ways that people perceive behavioral health issues and recovery in our country, we transformed select data into a series of 10 eye-catching infographics – an example is shown above. For examples and to learn more about how infographics can benefit your organization by making statistics easier to understand, visit Mashable’s Infographics page.

TIPS OF THE MONTH
According to a recent Nielsen report, Americans spend almost a quarter of their time online on social media sites, providing organizations the unique opportunity to connect with people across the country. Measuring your impact on social sites can help identify trends about who and what drives conversation. Following are some key metrics that can help determine the success of your organization’s social media efforts. Read the full article on Social Media Examiner for more information.

		Referring traffic. Website analytics, like Google Analytics, provide referring traffic information, which includes the number of times someone comes to your site from a link shared on a social media channel. By monitoring the trends in this data, you can identify which messages best resonate with your audiences to drive them to specific content or actions on your site.
		Share of the voice. Share of the voice is a metric that can help determine how influential you are compared to other organizations in the same space. It allows you to track the percentage of conversation around a given topic that is tied to your organization. Tools such as Social Mention or Radian 6 make it easy to calculate your share of the voice.
		Size of the community and engagement. Social customer relationship management (CRM) tools, such as Sprout Social, allow you to view all of your social channels in the same place, showing a full picture of the conversation. Sprout Social will also identify influential people within your communities. Knowing which people are influential allows you to create content that will garner more engagement from them and their network of followers.
		Sentiment. You can track the sentiment of feedback on social media channels by identifying each mention or comment as positive, neutral, or negative. Over time, you can see the changes in conversation sentiment and adjust your content to share information to which the community responds positively.