With millions of images uploaded to social media every day, chances are good that there are quite a few images that feature your brand logo. However, many of these photo posts often don’t include explicit brand mentions in the text. If your brand is missing these valuable sources of intel, your social listening cup is only half full. Images go a long way in influencing consumer perception of your brand. And image analysis helps you see the complete picture of how your brand is getting traction online.
To ensure you’re getting the most out of your social listening, we’ll look at how image analysis can help you grow your brand. Specifically, we’ll explore:
- What is image analysis?
- How to improve your image analysis
- Image analysis and audience perception
- How to grow and maintain a positive image analysis
Image analysis ensures that you’re not missing anything online that could negatively influence potential consumers. And consumers are constantly bombarded by images online that could easily sway opinion. Here are a few stats we uncovered you’ll want to keep in mind as we get going:
- Whether your brand comes across as authentic or not is heavily influential on consumer opinion. 86% of consumers feel that authenticity is a deciding factor on whether to purchase from a brand.
- Instagram receives over 80 million image uploads from users every day. That totals over 29 billion images a year.
- Being aware of all the images that feature your brand logo is crucial as they can potentially influence consumer opinion. That’s because humans are hardwired to process images 60,000 times faster than text-based data.
With that, let’s dive in and talk about what image analysis means.
What is Image Analysis?
Image analysis is a subset of social media data analytics that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to process images for meaningful information. Facial recognition software is probably the application that most people are accustomed to, but AI can be trained to recognize anything you want, such as:
- Unspoken sentiment
- Recent moves of a competitor
- How your product is being used
- User generated content (UGC) that can be used to your advantage
So many images are uploaded to social media daily and using image analysis to mine photos for brand logos allows you to keep track of how these photos can and will impact your brand image.
Since many photos capture logos that aren’t mentioned in the post’s text, adding image analysis to your social listening program increases the precision of your brand analysis.
Without image analysis, many of these conversations wouldn’t show up in your text-based social listening analytics. And you could be missing out on an excellent opportunity to promote your brand using UGC. Or you may locate a visual complaint, in which case you’ll want to act quickly before a consumer complaint spreads.
Below, we ran an image analysis on the Starbucks logo that returned a wealth of posts featuring the brand. Could the coffee king cash out on some of these user generated images? Image Analysis can tell them!
Another interesting feature of modern AI is that it can return results for your brand logos that are cut off, altered, or even reversed in a reflection. That way, your image analysis enhances your social listening strategy by seeing every detail of how your brand is portrayed online
The Relationship Between Image and Text Analysis
Image and text analysis have a symbiotic relationship. To capture the full picture of what consumers are saying online, it’s important to look at both text and images together when possible. Analyzing both text and images helps brands:
- More successfully incorporate social insights into the decision-making process. In this case, more is more! Looking at a more complete data set ensures you have all the information on the table before making important moves.
- Find slight, but critical distinctions in data between text and image. For example, the text analysis of a conversation on a popular show on Netflix could show the dominant age group of fans as Millennials. But an Image analysis could show the audience as being much younger.
And image analysis can be of great advantage to global strategies as well, as it doesn’t need to be translated.
Getting the Most Out of Your Image Analysis
Augmenting your text analysis with image analysis provides your brand a more accurate and comprehensive picture of what consumers are saying about your brand and products on social media. So, make sure that you include image analysis in your social listening regimen so you’re bringing every nugget of brand-related intel you can to your decision-making process.
And this is important because it means you are more accurately tracking the conversational volume of your brand mentions to better understand:
- Your share of voice: How do you compare to your competition?
- Sentiment: How do consumers feel about you and your products?
- Impressions: How far are your campaigns reaching?
Not only that, but you can also use image analysis to expand measurement and insights into your corporate sponsorships and events. This allows you to confirm who, where, and how people use your products in a particular sector or see your ad placements.
Here, using image analysis, we captured Twitter posts with Nike logos taken on soccer fields. This analysis reveals how consumers are using their products, and which scenes are the most strongly associated with the brand:
Additionally, image analysis extends your social listening flexibility by:
Giving you the context surrounding your brand logo use- How is your logo or product being used?
- Protecting your brand reputation – Is the image showing your product as faulty? Or is someone misrepresenting your brand and what is stands for?
- Enhancing your global strategy by uncovering image posts authored in any language – This captures what people around the world are saying, and this could potentially make you privy to an opportunity in a new location.
Image Analysis and Brand Perception
Since 86% of consumers feel a brand’s authenticity is a deciding factor in their purchase decisions, it is crucial to know how they are exposed to your brand. Therefore, knowing the context surrounding the use of your logo or branding means you see what posts are most impactful to your target audience.
Image analysis gives you the visual context to consumers’ perception of your brand. And you can do that by drilling down into the objects, scenes, emotions, and other logos that appear in images alongside your brand.
Understanding the Visual Context
Understanding the visual context in which consumers are experiencing your brand online opens a new door to informing your messaging strategies. Here, the word cloud shows the objects that most often appear in images featuring the Nike logo over the last month.
This information is valuable in measuring impacts within the audiences that you are seeking to reach. For instance, if your brand wants to reach pet lovers, the posts featuring dogs and cats will shed light on how that audience responds to those images.
Likewise, look at all the travel-related terms such as airplane, train, motorcycle, bicycle, etc. What if you wanted to align some of your marketing messaging to speak to that since consumers are returning to travel?
Sorting through images of people talking about travel that include your brand already can be a beneficial tool in structuring your messaging.
After all, it’s as if social media users are already out there testing your potential marketing messaging angles for you.
Using Image Analysis to Grow and Maintain Your Brand’s Image
Using image analysis to monitor brand perception helps you identify anything that might tarnish how consumers feel about your brand. Therefore, it’s extremely valuable in helping to safeguard your brand’s reputation.
For example, just as you can use image analysis to identify new influencers getting traction with photos that include your logo, you can also identify detractors.
Additionally, the power of image recognition technology allows you to spot fake products or other fraudulent uses of your logo. As such, image analysis should be in your brand health arsenal.
Protecting Your Brand Using Image Analysis
Using image analysis to track issues and risks, such as your brand logo used in conjunction with the word “boycott” could save you lots of stress and potential lost revenue. Monitor how your logo appears in posts that contain campaign keywords. Track sentiment across posts with no explicit brand mention for an understanding of your visual brand perception.
And for the ultimate in using image analysis to safeguard your brand health and consumer perception, you can set alerts to know when image posts featuring your logo run afoul of specific parameters.
For example, you can set up alerts to notify you when your brand logo has been misused or when an influencer or activist uses your logo.
Image analysis can undoubtedly help you grow your brand. You can learn more about image analytics and logo recognition here, and when you’re done, be sure to reach out for a demo and take world-class image analytics for a test drive.
