Activities, age and photography style: What the new Visual Insights can reveal about social media images

With the wealth of visual content available online, it's important for businesses to have tools that help them find the most relevant information about their audience. Image recognition software such as YouScan's Visual Insights—which can detect logos, objects, and scenes in photos—has been helping brands access this valuable data for over a year since its launch.

However, our customers' quest for knowledge didn't stop there: they wanted to get more information out of social media images. Who is depicted in the image—a child, an adult or a senior? What are they doing in the picture? What is the color scheme of the photo? Where are people most likely to snap a selfie?

Answers to these questions can help your business gain valuable insights about your target audience, and find out which elements make up an engaging and shareable social media photo post.

These questions also proved to be a fun puzzle for YouScan's Data Science team. Today, we are happy to share the results of their work: a new and improved Visual Insights feature.

Here is what you can find out about social images using Visual Insights 2.0:

Activities

What kind of activities are commonly associated with your brand? With YouScan, you can find out which activities help a photo earn high engagement. Our new algorithm can identify over 60 different types of activities in images: from running and biking, to cooking, public speaking, driving, and many more.

Customer personas

In addition to the gender of people depicted in social media images, New Visual Insights can help you create more accurate customer personas by identifying age (toddlers, children, teens, adults, seniors) and occupation (dancer, musician, athlete, public speaker, model, etc.)

You can apply multiple Visual Insights filters to your content searches. In the example below, the Gallery is only showing photos of toddlers in winter settings:

Color scheme

Research shows that the color choice for marketing campaigns and branding can have a huge impact on how these assets are perceived by the audience. Now, you can find out whether your color scheme is having the desired effect on your customers. Are there any correlations between the color scheme and activities, or the age and occupation of people in pictures? YouScan can help you find the answers to these questions and many others.

Updated bubble chart data visualizations

Similar to objects and scenes in the original version of Visual Insights, you can now represent people and their actions as packed bubble charts. This type of visualization can help you find out at a glance which actions and customer personas are most commonly depicted in visual content related to your brand.

Photography style

Visual Insights 2.0 goes beyond the ability to distinguish between a photograph and an illustration or a cartoon. The new algorithm can tell a selfie apart from a regular portrait; know the difference between a monochromatic photo and a color one; be able to tell a still life from a portrait, an extreme close-up from a wide shot; and separate the sponsored content from user-generated content. It can also help filter out all the staged product photos against a solid background (like the ones that can be seen in online stores), which provide no additional information about your target audience.

YouScan's new image recognition algorithm can also recognize over 300 various scenes and use cases: from simple ones such as "city," "nature," "store," to the more sophisticated analysis of different types of events and settings, time of day, weather conditions, etc.

Visual Insights 2.0 can identify over 400 objects and can even recognize real friendship:

But don't let us tell you—see Visual Insights in action and test it out yourself. If you're already a YouScan user, get in touch with your customer success manager to try Visual Insights 2.0. If you're not using YouScan yet, request a demo today!