Social listening has helped brands keep track of online conversations, tapping into opportunities to talk to their audience at the right time. But what about conversations that go unseen through what we see every day?
Yes, we’re talking about all the conversations happening online through visuals. The inability to look into what the 3 billion+ images being shared across social media every day have to say, is missing out on critical business insights that can help you understand your audience better.
Though the problem here is bigger – almost 85% of visuals being shared online lack text references to the brands or the products being shown.
A picture is worth 1000 words and considering that the human brain processes visuals as quickly as 13 milliseconds, we believe it’s time for you to give another dimension to your social listening – image analytics.
What is image analysis/ analytics?
Image analysis refers to the process of extracting meaningful information from images being shared in the digital landscape. It means leveraging the power of artificial intelligence that drives social listening, to recognize attributes within an image.
For example, take a look at your iPhone. There is an album in there that has auto-captured the faces of the people in your photos, attributing them to the names of the contacts you have added pictures of in your contact book. That’s a form of image analysis!
What is image analysis in social listening?
Social media listening has mostly been about text analysis – captions, comments, news, tweets, and other formats wherein there is a reference to the brand or the product being shown in the visual.
But when image analysis is applied to social listening, it acts as an extension to the text analysis, applying the same logic to visual content.
For example, instead of looking for the word ‘eyewear’, image analysis helps you identify all the posts that contain visuals of ‘eyewear’.
With the help of image analytics, you can also identify faces within visuals to determine the sentiment behind them, along with demographic data like age, gender and more. It also lets businesses identify elements like logos, activities, objects, and scenes within a visual, and describe it with a statement that represents what it is about.
Ready to get started with image analytics in social listening? Book a demo of Radarr today.
Why is image analysis important?
Social media platforms are becoming more visually driven by the day. While text analysis in social listening will always be important, it’s becoming important for businesses to look into what people are talking about with the help of images too.
Think about the last time you weren’t feeling productive and posted a meme about it on social media instead of using text to describe the mood.
Image analysis in social listening basically helps you capture the complete story by deep diving into what both text and images have to say.
A few other reasons why we believe image analytics is important, include:
- Getting a complete picture helps businesses get more insights for better decision-making
- Image analytics helps you validate and fool-proof your text analysis when the conclusions are confusing
- Insights from images don’t require translations like textual insights do; helping businesses create global-fit strategies
- Images help look into context, environment and emotional factors that may be hard to gauge through text
Ready to get started with image analytics in social listening? Book a demo of Radarr today.
How can brands use image analytics in social listening?
While image analysis is fairly new in the digital landscape owing to the advanced technology behind it, we’re seeing businesses starting to work with it more extensively by the day to fuel different use cases, purposes, and strategies.
1. Track brand mentions more accurately
Some people share their experiences using text. But many others choose visuals instead. The goal of social listening is to track brand mentions; but what happens to the conversations happening through visuals if you’re following the standardized text analysis? You lose out on conversations. That’s where image analytics comes in.
2. Improve sentiment analysis
A lot of businesses are using social listening to track conversations that help them gauge the sentiment of their audience. But think about how accurately you were able to identify the emotions of someone who wrote to you vs someone who spoke to you face to face. Visuals have a similar impact. This is where image analytics comes in to help brands gather insights from both text and image analytics on the sentiment of consumers.
To know more about how sentiment analysis works in social listening.
3. Find visual influencers
While you may have collaborated with a few influencers for your campaigns, there will be many others who are simply recommending your brand or products to their audience. These could be people you haven’t yet reached out to but have a considerable amount of influence on your target audience. Image analytics helps you identify these visual influencers and also keep track of the impact they are making on your business.
4. Keep track of user generated content
Using user-generated content in your marketing strategies can help boost campaign engagement by a whopping 50%. It has proven to even boost conversions by 10% on campaigns across social media and email. Image analysis combined with social listening makes it easy for businesses to find user-generated content.
5. Protect brand collaterals and trademarks
As your business starts to grow, so do the conversations around it. Not just textual, but visual references too. This is where you need to keep a close watch on how your brand collaterals like the logo, product imagery, and more are being used. With image analysis in social listening, you will be able to detect fraudulent use of your brand collaterals and logo manipulation that can potentially damage your business in the long run.
6. Better crisis management
Crisis management has been a big use case of social listening all these years. If negative textual comments worry you, imagine how much damage can the visual ones do, considering how statistics found that content with visuals is 40x more likely to be shared. Think about the last time a brand’s campaign resulted in the sharing of negative memes across the internet! With image analysis, businesses will be able to manage their online reputation better by digging into what visuals people are associating with your brand.
7. Improve insights on sponsorship ROI
When businesses sponsor events, their brand logo gets featured in plenty of visual collateral. But the brand name does not get explicitly mentioned, which makes it hard for the business to track ROI from such sponsorships. With image analytics, businesses can now look into visuals of articles and posts around the event, and measure the two key important metrics – impressions and engagement.
For example, without image analytics, Coca-Cola would miss out on this mention in Red Sox’s tweet around the event:
8. Identify moments of consumption
Ever wondered how your customers are putting products to use or how they feel when they do so? Image analytics can bring out that information for you, letting you see who, where and how people are using your products. It also lets you, deep-dive, into the sentiment of people when they are using your products.
For example, with image analytics in social listening, GymShark would be able to capture how and where people tend to wear their apparel. In this case, for dog walks and yoga sessions!
Ready to get started with image analytics in social listening? Book a demo of Radarr today.
How can you get started with image analytics in social listening?
Now that you see the potential of image analytics, you’re probably wondering how to start tracking all the visuals being shared across the internet.
Well, if you have a social listening tool like Radarr, we got you covered.
Radarr is powered by artificial intelligence to help you listen to social conversations more closely, both text and visual.
Here is the complete guide to Instagram social listening.
Ready to tap into the power of image analytics? Book a demo of Radarr today.
