3 Reasons to Monitor Visual Mentions

We all know how crucial Social Media Monitoring is for any brand’s analytics strategy. Text-based reporting is a great resource as it allows brands to detect their text-based mentions on various social media platforms. But what about visual mentions? What happens when a social media user uploads an image of a product without an accompanying textual reference to its corresponding brand? Visual monitoring is just as important as text-based monitoring if brands want to receive accurate insights into the abundance of various online data uploaded everyday.

Here are three reasons why Social Media Monitoring companies need to integrate logo detection into their existing platforms in order to provide their customers with more rounded brand insights.

1. Images are more powerful than text:

As humans, we process visuals 60,000 times faster than text, so gathering information is much quicker for us when it’s image-based. With visuals increasing in popularity across social media, it’s much faster to communicate with one another using them. The number of videos appearing online is also increasing. On most platforms, videos even automatically play on a user’s feed. Think about when you are scrolling through your Newsfeed on Facebook and the number of videos you come across that automatically play without you prompting them to do so. Not only does this encourage you, but it actually forces you to watch those videos.

With the increase in popularity of image-based social media platforms, such as Instagram and Snapchat, visuals are fast becoming the basis for online communication. Although Facebook has 1.7 billion users, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat all dominate current daily use per user. In addition, the number of photos and videos shared on Facebook is increasing, meaning there is an evident movement towards visual communication online. But what does this mean for brands? If images are increasingly being used to communicate online, chances are a lot of those conversations will involve products or services.

2. 3.2 billion photos are uploaded to the internet every day:

In 2014, that number was 1.8 billion. This steady increase in the number of images uploaded daily means that the number of images of brands appearing online is also increasing. In addition to this, visual content is 40 times more likely to be shared than other forms of content! So it’s safe to assume that an image containing your brand’s logo is more likely to be shared than a text post containing it. Visual monitoring is therefore vital for brands to analyze complete data and insights gathered from their visual mentions.

The billions of photos that are uploaded to the internet come from all over the world. Images don’t require translation, so image analysis is particularly useful when it comes to global campaigns and strategies. This is great news for brands, right? Analyzing visuals using logo detection is easy for any brand in any country as they don’t need to translate any text.

3. 88% of images shared online don’t include a text reference to the brand:

We now know that the dangers of only analyzing text-based mentions means brands are missing out on huge chunks of data. And the statistic above proves that Social Media Monitoring isn’t just about text anymore. But it’s also important when it comes to monitoring User Generated Content (UGC). Take the image below as an example:

This highlights just how important monitoring visual mentions is. While the user hashtags the film affiliated with the brand’s campaign, they make no textual reference whatsoever to the brand itself. Since the user mentions the bottle of water in a positive light, this insight would be extremely useful to the brand, particularly in the context of User Generated Content. If this user has a substantial number of followers, the brand could sponsor them to promote certain products on their social media accounts. The promotion would reach a large audience who are likely to be interested in the product as they are following a user who is.

Visuals are so important when it comes to Social Media Monitoring and general brand monitoring. Neglecting the advantages of analyzing the data they generate will only be harmful to the brand as their insights simply won’t be accurate.