How the FT uses charts and graphics to entice readers

Lucinda Southern of Digiday writes about how the Financial Times is using charts and graphics — in addition to its written stories — to attract readers.

Southern writes, “For instance, when the team wanted to show the change in wealth in America since 1971, it created an animated GIF to use in the online article. The FT published two articles, ‘America’s Middle-Class Meltdown: Core shrinks to half of US homes‘ with the chart, which had twice as many pageviews as the article without (‘America’s Middle-class Meltdown‘). Also, it was the FT’s highest-performing tweet last year, according to Smith. While it took a couple of days to create the GIF, adding in a line of code makes it easily adapted to print and social media, rather than starting a new workflow to create it for the newspaper.

“The FT uses social media as a mouthpiece to attract new readers and direct them to deeper analysis. When graphics are self-contained, they work well on social.

“A relatively obscure story on the aging population of Japan won’t necessarily pique widespread interest, so the FT created an animated graphic straight for social media which highlighted some of the more interesting data points. ‘Japan has this rapidly aging demographic time bomb, which is what happens when you have a much tighter immigration policy,’ said Smith. ‘This already makes it a much broader-interest story.’

“Before this year, FT had never seen a video reach the half-million view mark on Facebook. In May, two data visualization videos, created specifically for Facebook, amassed more than 800,000 views; on average, they have 25,000 views, according to Tubular Labs. One, a high-production video on what would happen during Japan’s next big earthquake, linked back to much deeper analysis on the story on the FT. The other, which only took a couple of hours to create, is a made-for-Facebook portrait of Brazil in four charts. Smith notes its success was buoyed by the high numbers of Brazilians on Facebook and the timeliness of this year’s Rio Olympics.”

Read more here.