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Crimson Hexagon Bows Image Analytics

Social media intelligence firm Crimson Hexagon has unveiled a new image analytics service as part of its ForSight analytics platform, the company announced this week. Among other capabilities the new product allows marketers to see how and where consumers are sharing images of their logos, even when the brand isn’t mentioned by name.

While previous analytics platforms have focused on text, the image detection and analytics feature is intended to help brands keep pace with changing usage patterns, as consumers post more pictures and video of themselves interacting with brand content and products -- but not always with a corresponding textual mention.

The image analytics feature can pick up logo images in posts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and Snapchat, yielding insights which clients can use in marketing campaigns, loyalty and retention programs, ad strategy, corporate messaging, and customer service, among other areas. Crimson Hexagon’s current roster of clients includes Campbell’s, Allstate, and O2 Telefonica UK.

There’s no question that visual content plays an increasingly important role in how people communicate on social media. Back in May 2013, social media maven Mary Meeker (say that three times fast!) calculated social media users were uploading around 500 million images to platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, Snapchat and the like on a daily basis. By May 2014 that had more than tripled to 1.8 billion images per day.

The rise of digital video has been even more impressive. On Facebook alone, the number of video views has soared from one billion per day in the third quarter of 2014 to four billion per day in the first quarter of 2015, with 75% of this viewing taking place on mobile, according to Meeker. 

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