Five reasons infographics are worth incorporating into your content strategy

1. Infographics are social media magnets, highly viral/sharable; they frequently trend to the top of social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon.
2. Infographics can round out a media pitch into a robust storytelling package, making it more compelling to reporters, particularly in the case of publications with small or non-existent art departments.
3. Infographics can simplify a very complex or technical story, or make an otherwise flat story more engaging.
4. Infographics are multi-functional – they can be used as a story package pitched to media, direct to audience on the news center, embedded into a blog post and posted to a Facebook page.
5. As tablets gain further popularity – and particularly as more media begin to roll out tablet-specific editions (e.g., News Corp’s The Daily for iPad) – visual storytelling is going to take on a new level of importance.

A good example is this infographic created by Wilson Electronics and pitched to Mashable:

In addition to generating the story itself, Wilson Electronics got quite a bit of social media mileage out of the infographic (2,840 tweets, 2K Facebook likes, 879 StumbleUpon posts, 75 LinkedIn shares… just from the Mashable play).

Part of what makes this particular example compelling to reporters and lends to its traction on social media (aside from its provocative content) is that it pulls from multiple data sets,  which makes the data more robust and adds credibility.