Best image recognition software to boost your brand's social media listening

A comparison of the best image identifier software in social media monitoring tools for business

Three billion photos are uploaded to social networks every day. As a result of this ever-increasing volume of visual information, visual analytics have become an essential feature for top social media monitoring tools for consumer research and marketing strategy. In this post, we’ll teach you to use the new logo recognition tool, and highlight the top social network monitoring tools that offer this feature to brands.

How to leverage image recognition software for business strategy

Image recognition powered by artificial intelligence algorithms has dominated the industry for the past few years. Developments in this field have been contributed by top industry leaders like Google, Amazon and Microsoft, as well as smaller innovative companies that cater to specific market segments.

But while image analysis remains an entertaining puzzle for some, others are actively leveraging it for extracting valuable information about their customers. Studies suggest that over 80% of photos and videos are published online without accompanying text or hashtags. This means that marketers aren’t seeing over 4/5 of all their brand mentions and are increasingly out of the loop when it comes to public perception of their brand or product. Thus, logo recognition technology has become essential for determining which visual posts are relevant to your brand.

Image recognition and visual context analysis

The ability to detect a logo in images allows marketers to conduct a deeper analysis of the brand’s presence in various surroundings and contexts. While ordinary analytics tools identify brand mentions only in text-based content, image recognition significantly widens the scope of your social media monitoring, and deepens your understanding of the modern Instagram-oriented audience. In addition to identifying posts about your company, the most sophisticated image recognition tools allow you to understand the context surrounding these posts. Such social media monitoring apps allow you to examine the picture and the accompanying text together as a whole, in order to identify ad hoc mentions and reviews, positive and negative feedback. This way, image analysis helps you get a realistic view of your brand’s presence on social media and its role in your customers’ daily lives.

What is social image recognition?

Image recognition is exactly what it sounds like — identifying specific elements in an image, such as its setting, the objects within it, the actions being depicted in it, etc. This process of picking out specific image elements is usually done through specialized image identification software, which nowadays heavily relies on machine learning algorithms. Similar to how humans learn about new environments or a new language through exposure, these algorithms "learn" about various elements of an image by being presented with a massive visual database and trained to distinguish different parts of images from one another.

Social image recognition involves applying these image identification algorithms to images uploaded and distributed through a social network. This allows digital marketers to stay abreast of all the relevant mentions of their brand, even if there's no text associated with that mention.

Why is image recognition important?

In addition to getting a more complete picture of brand's online share of voice and various conversations happening around it, image recognition reveals a treasure trove of insights for brands.

Using an image recognition app that identifies the scene or setting depicted in the photo, you can find out about unexpected use cases for your product, which could help you target your marketing strategy more effectively. By identifying other objects that often appear alongside your logo or your brand's products in user-generated photos, you can be inspired to potential new marketing campaigns or collaboration opportunities.

Image recognition can also help you find new brand advocates and detractors that don't explicitly mention your brand in their written posts, but post clearly positive or negative imagery associated with it. For example, say you're a major clothing brand, and a social media influencer organically posts a photo wearing one of your products, without tagging you or mentioning the brand in the caption. Their willingness to be associated with one of your products organically may signal their willingness to create sponsored content for your brand - but without image recognition software to tip you off about the photo, you could have missed out on this collaboration opportunity! A less positive example is someone posting a photo of one of your garments in the garbage bin. Additional analysis of the caption sentiment and other objects in the photo may reveal that this was a beloved item and the user is sad to part with it; but it could also be a message that your brand's products are no good. Zeroing in on these images through image recognition software can help you engage with the potential detractor, and maybe even turn them into an advocate with your proactive approach!

Here are the 10 best image recognition tools for social media listening

YouScan proprietary image recognition solution

YouScan offers one of the most powerful and convenient tools for logo recognition in images — YouScan Visual Insights, which presents a complete picture of online discussions about your brand.

YouScan’s image recognition capabilities aren’t limited to logo detection; it also offers a comprehensive analysis of the image’s context by identifying objects (people, animals, things, etc.) and settings (surrounding area, event, building, etc.).

This approach allows you to get a better understanding of your products’ use cases, helps you find previously unknown influencers, evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and calculate ROI from event sponsorships. YouScan users will always have access to Visual Insights to learn when, in what settings, and, most importantly, why customers use the brand’s products.

LogoGrab

If you’re already using social media intelligence tools that help you work with text-based social media posts, you can use ready-made API like LogoGrab Brand Detection for your image recognition needs. This AI technology can identify logos in images, leaving you with extra capacity for other tasks like evaluating market share and mention analysis.

Brandwatch

Brandwatch is one of the top social media monitoring services in the world. It was among the first social media intelligence tools to offer brand mention analysis. Brandwatch has excellent coverage and a sophisticated analytics toolkit. Brandwatch also offers image recognition as a service, allowing users to set up Image Insights according to their needs and get notifications for specific scenarios, such as negative mentions.

A robust data visualization system allows you to quickly analyze the situation and make strategic decisions in real-time.

Crimson Hexagon

While Crimson Hexagon officially merged with Brandwatch in 2018, this collaboration will help their future product functionalities get to market faster. In the meantime, both systems continue business as usual. Crimson Hexagon has wide-ranging capabilities for monitoring online brand mentions and offers convenient analytics tools, including detailed recognition of images with logos, objects, scenes and even actions taking place in the photo. The Image Reverse Search function allows you to not only find logos, but also images that look similar to them.

Talkwalker

This company keeps an up-to-date database of various logos for the purposes of competitor analysis, and offers monitoring for 10 social networks and 150 million websites in several countries that allow users to upload photos. Talkwalker offers tools for analyzing visual and text mentions, provides instant reports about marketing and sponsorship campaign performance, and detects potential misuse of branded assets. Talkwalker’s unique offering includes integration of offline data, as well as a public API for working with other analytics platforms.

deepsense.ai

Deepsense.ai also uses neural networks to detect brand mentions. According to their website, their tools can work with both images and video (“video or image streams”). You’ll have to test this software to see it in action. By complementing these capabilities with built-in analytics tools and reporting systems, Deepsense.ai users can compare their progress with their competitors’ in real-time.

Sprinklr

Sprinklr offers their clients a unified cloud platform for customer management on social media. Their services include Marketing Cloud, Advertisement Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Research Cloud and Care Cloud. Sprinklr’s analytical features comprise Visual Listening services, which track brand mentions on social media in real-time. Sprinklr can be described as a comprehensive solution for marketing automation and customer support. It can also be integrated with other analytics software to expand one’s brand recognition technology capabilities (there’s an API integration for this).

GumGum

GumGum was created by computer vision developers. Experts in charge of this project learned how to identify dental enamel issues, car body damage, as well as logo detection in images and video. At present, GumGum offers image recognition as a service for digital marketers, in order to provide a quick way to identify and compare advertising campaigns with the competitors’ efforts, and helps find the most effective and efficient platforms for banner ad placement. This technology isn’t fully integrated with social networks, but is better suited for graphic designers working with display ads.

Linkfluence

Linkfluence is a major player in digital transformation and social media data analysis. The company specializes in European markets and offers a robust tool for data collection and analysis. Linkfluence positions itself as tool for gathering Actionable Insight. Linkfluence offers two products, Radarly and Search. The first one helps you find mentions of your brand online, including logo detection; while Search allows you to compare ROI and campaign results, conduct competitor analysis, and identify trending topics on social media.

NetBase

Analytics platform NetBase leverages logo detection for measuring your brand’s impact on social media. NetBase image identification software allows them to combine the analysis of images containing branded assets with a keyword-based image search. NetBase can identify emotion by facial expressions on photos, and as a result, can not only present brand mentions but also determine their context.

Conclusion

Photo-based social networks are at the peak of their popularity. Take Instagram: the number of active users on this photo social network has grown from 700,000 to 1 billion from September 2017. As a result, consumers are publishing more photos and videos more frequently. It’s not an easy task to determine the relevance of a visual post to your brand without proper social media intelligence tools. And some forward-thinking marketers at major FMCG brands are already using logo detection tools for analyzing social media photo content in their daily work.

In order to achieve measurable results for your business and increase the effectiveness of your marketing strategy, you need image recognition software that offers logo detection, object and scene analysis for the images, and putting this analysis in the wider context of global industry trends. While there is no shortage of image recognition apps on the market, the best social media monitoring software offers comprehensive solutions which combine trend detection, mention analysis and logo detection features.