Earlier this morning I got it into my head that i wanted to try and create a animated GIFs of a few charts, but wanted to run a test to see if I could do it.
What was surprising to me was how, despite all their hype in the ad industry, Snapchat is barely making a blip. I'm also surprised that there isn't more interest in Reddit, though that could be because it's a personal favourite site of mine, and because it also bills itself the "front page of the internet."
Process:
1.) I utilized Google Trends, and entered the names of a few different social networks (see notes below for exclusion of Facebook).
2.) I then exported a .csv file of the data
3.) I then opened this in Microsoft Excel (probably my favourite tool).
4.) I then cut the data, and selected Paste Special (Transpose) to re-paste into the Excel document with the the rows/columns reversed.
5.) I then copied this data, and pasted it into the data section of a chart in Keynote
6.) After a bit of fine-tuning with the Animate settings in Keynote and building another layer for the background, I exported the slide as a Quicktime file.
7.) Which was then converted into a .Mov file so that I could...
8.) Utilise Giphy to convert it into an animated Gif.
Some notes:
- I know that utilizing Google Trends data for search interest isn't the best way of gauging the popularity of particular social networks (active users, engagement, visits, etc are probably better) but it was an easy way to grab some data to practice my graph animate skills.
- I purposely didn't include Facebook in this - it was so popular that the other social networks were just flat lines along the x axis. Data selection at its finest.
What's Next?
I'll probably refine my process for this, and look to improve the readability/visual style of these graphs. Let me know if there any interesting data sets I can look at for my next one.