Fact-checking is the heart of high-valued content

Chart of the Day: ‘Accurate and informative’ are most important aspects of online content

Everyone is always asking ‘what does good content look like?’ Turns out, people don’t mind what it looks like, so long as it’s accurate.

A survey of over 1,000 adult consumers (for my money, the most knowledgeable of all consumers) from Adobe has shown that people put higher stock in the factual base of content than how it can be consumed, such as its simplicity or interactivity.

There’s no doubt that videos and interactive landing pages can make your content memorable and shareable. They could even end up bagging your brand an awwward, being showcased as some of the internet’s most well-crafted content, but they won’t put you at the front of people’s minds when they want what has become the most valuable commodity of this century: information.

Some great examples of putting substance over style can be found over at the subreddit r/dataisbeautiful. Here, many charts and graphs could be more aesthetically pleasing, but the focus is on the information being presented and how effectively it is conveyed. Every post needs to cite its source so visitors to the subreddit know that they aren’t being tricked into giving their all-important karma.

Just look at the graph at the top of this page. It doesn’t do anything more than it needs to. No cute icons or distracting ‘did you know?’ boxes trying to crowbar more information in. You know what you’re going to learn and then you see it.

Creating content to promote a brand is hard. I wrote, edited, designed, photographed, and briefed people who can draw far better than me for almost five years and my clients weren’t always from exciting industries. Success, however, cannot be bought with slick graphics. It’s a matter of knowing what information your readers/customers want to hear and giving it to them.

Here is a handful of sites you can use to find quality third-party information to bolster your content - Bureau of Labor Statistics (US employment stats), YouGov (UK stats and whitepapers), Statista (global research).

• Source: Adobe via marketing charts
• Sample: 1,011 adult consumers who own at least one digital device
• Recommended resource: Top 10 common content marketing mistakes