Image search: the next generation of social listening

As video and images come to dominate social media, social listening tools need to adapt. It’s a sign of the visual times that Brandwatch is introducing logo recognition to its monitoring dashboard.

The new “Image Insights” tool (see this guide for info) allows users to find images shared on Twitter that contain their brand’s logo – or those of their competitors.

For big brands, this is exciting stuff.

If you’re Pepsi, for example, you’d be able to see that your logo has featured in more than 8 thousand images posted on Twitter in the last 28 days. The screenshot above shows a selection – this is exactly what Pepsi’s marketing team would see on their new Brandwatch dashboard.

For event marketers who value “amount of media exposure generated” and “awareness of brand” as ROI metrics for sponsorships, being able to track visual mentions is essential.

And for brands trying to allocate media spend (billboards, product placement or team jersey sponsorship?), the image wall gives an indication as to which method generates the greatest impact.

Instagram image insights are coming soon. As for video image search, that’s still a way off, but the bar has been set by Google – it’s new machine learning API recognises objects in videos. Social listening tools can’t afford to be too far behind.