Is your social media monitoring missing something?

What Social Media Monitoring has been missing

Are you finding more and more images and videos containing brand logos are appearing on social media? Are you looking for a way to identify these logos, but only have a text-based solution? Well, have you heard of a logo recognition tool for Social Media Monitoring? If not, we’re going to tell you all about how you can identify logos and why you need a logo recognition tool for your Social Media Monitoring platform to provide to your brands.

Visual Listening

Without Visual Listening integrated into a Social Listening strategy, brands miss out on a huge chunk of data from social media. But what is it? Visual Listening utilizes logo recognition technology, which is a specific form of image recognition. Using logo recognition, brands can detect their logos, as well as their competitors’ logos, on social media.

So why do brands need Visual Listening? A few years ago, there was a sudden increase in the volume of images of brands appearing online, and that number continues to grow year by year. In fact, over 3 billion images are shared daily on social media, 80% of which have no textual mention to a brand. Textual analysis would be enough for brands if images and videos weren’t in the equation, or if those publishing these visuals included a textual reference to the brand they are referring to. However, this is not the case. Therefore, Social Media Monitoring companies need to offer a way for their brands to analyze images and videos in order to see where their logos are appearing and what people are saying about them and their products.

Consumer insights for brands

One of the main advantages of having a logo recognition tool is the accurate and comprehensive insights brands can access. The combined data collected from both textual and visual analyses allows brands to have a better understanding of their audience. They can also better understand how their audience is interacting with their products, especially when textual analysis says one thing and visual analysis says another.

For example, a lot of consumers might be discussing how they use a certain brand’s product. Let’s say the majority of consumers on social media post about how they like to enjoy a particular brand’s ice-cream outside in the sun in a text-based format. Thanks to textual analysis, the brand can detect these conversations online and decide that they should focus their advertising efforts on selling their ice-creams to people who attend beaches and parks, or other places where they can enjoy ice-cream outside in the sun.

However, what this brand mightn’t know is that an even larger number of consumers are posting images of their ice-creams when they are in the cinema or at home watching Netflix. Because this brand’s Social Media Monitoring platform doesn’t provide logo recognition capabilities, they have missed out on an even larger audience, i.e. movie-lovers, and ultimately, an even larger revenue stream. So, a combination of textual and visual analyses are needed in order for brands to make the most informed marketing decisions they possibly can.

The volume of images and videos requires automation

There are literally billions of images posted to social media on a daily basis. This means that Social Media Monitoring platforms need to invest in some sort of automated logo detection tool in order to sift through the volume of visuals their brands could appear in. Artificial Intelligence and automation are certainly needed in order to detect logos at scale if brands want to gain an accurate reading of audience conversations about their products. The volume of visuals online is simply too much for humans to analyze without the assistance of an automated solution.

Logo Placement

Something that Social Media Monitoring companies should also be aware of is the advantages of Logo Placement technology. This allows brands to be able to find out which objects their logos appear on. There are many other ways this can be useful for brands too, such as Sports Sponsorship Monitoring. Logo Placement can also assist a brand’s marketing teams when creating campaigns as they can already see what products their customers are buying, where they are using them, and how often they post about them.

Choosing a logo recognition tool

The most important factor to consider when choosing a logo recognition tool is the needs of your clients. What is important to them? Precision and recall are the two main metrics to be aware of in terms of the accuracy of the technology. Precision involves how accurate the detections were, i.e. whether or not the images that were detected do in fact contain the logos in the dataset. Recall determines whether or not the technology detected all possible images containing the logos. Benchmarking these results to establish what brands want from logo detection is crucial to gaining the most value from the detection results.

So, there you have it. Now you know how your Social Media Monitoring platform can identify logos online and why an automated logo recognition solution is important for brands to take advantage of. If you want to find out more about how to identify logos and also how to integrate a logo recognition tool into your existing platform, why not ask a member of the VISUA team now?