How Computer Vision AI can help Marketers win at Social Media.
Social Media growth in the past decade has been swift and unprecedented. And companies of every kind now engage with customers on the various platforms to create communities of like-minded fans and followers in order to get a competitive advantage. Meanwhile, the vast amount of data that brands now have about audiences and their behaviors has opened up new opportunities for forward thinking Marketers.
These Marketers understand that in order to effectively target consumers, they have to know who their consumers are, what their consumers are consuming, how they are consuming, and how their product fits into the mix. With recent developments in artificial intelligence, these consumer insights have become easier to access than ever.
One area of AI which holds great promise for Marketers is the field of Computer Vision. This branch of artificial intelligence mimics a human's perception of an image and can identify and analyze the inherent data (colors, places, people etc) in that image. These algorithms can describe the data elements within thousands of images and videos, identify patterns in the data and convert these patterns into useful business insights. Computer Vision has a broad range of application across several industries.
In Food Manufacturing for example, Computer Vision can identify which flavors and colors consumers like best based on images captured from a supermarket shelf, and can help a manufacturer determine what to produce, how much of it, and at what time. In Logistics, Computer Vision is transforming the way companies transport, store and deliver merchandise by tracking the image of an item from the time it leaves the warehouse to the time it gets to your door. And in Medicine, Doctors are using Computer Vision to quickly and accurately identify, diagnose, and treat conditions by being able to analyze thousands of x-rays in a few seconds. And there’s more.
Computer Vision and Social Media
Pictures and Videos are crucial elements in Brand Communication and this requirement has only increased with the rise of social media. According to one study, the majority of people, over 65 percent, describe themselves as visual learners , meaning they extract more information from what they see rather than what they read.
Major product breakthroughs in Computer Vision for Social Media arrived around 2017, a time when organic reach was plummeting and Marketers were struggling to get attention. Social Media had become huge and unwieldy. Consumers were sharing millions of images every second, live-stream went mainstream, and content was being made like never before.
Any Marketer spending hours combing through social media to find ideas and trends worth posting or building content around, at some point would begin to ask , how exactly are images and video clips ultimately selected for posting? What makes certain visual posts engaging for the audience? And how can I be sure if my post is going to take off?
Knowing what will work is a tough business, and mostly relies on educated guessing, which is usually unreliable. Computer Vision promises to remove the human bias and guesswork involved in making those creative decisions.
Here is how…
Computer Vision AI like the one we leverage for our clients at HelloScribe can ingest real-time image and video data along with metadata such as user reactions - likes, shares and hashtags. And can cross reference this against a dataset of the world's 35,000 top performing social brands, each with 3 years worth of Social Media image and video data. It then assigns a quality score which answers the question; what post will drive the most engagement? And recommends the exact kind of image or video that will work best.
This approach offers a number of unique advantages. Key among them the fact that ‘Marketers can now create an experience customized to how their customers prefer to engage with brands in their category. By using AI to make more informed decisions, they can tap into a centralized repository of AI-derived knowledge, instead of relying on their own experience, bias, or memory to decide what content will work best for each channel.
There is a cost advantage as well. Brands spend as much as $50 million per year buying and licensing images and videos without knowing whether they'll do the intended job. That's a heavy price to pay, and even with the most intuitive and creative people on the Marketing team, there's no way to know for sure if consumers will connect with the images you choose. It's largely a guessing game. An expensive one at that. But thanks to Computer Vision these cost variables will be eliminated once and for all.
How Successful Marketers use Computer Vision
There are several companies reaping the benefits of Computer Vision for Social Media. One of them is Coca Cola. A recent case study outlined how they use Computer Vision to analyse social media images to understand where, when and how their customers like to consume their products, and which products are more popular in different markets. With over 90% of their new consumers making purchase decisions based on social media content, understanding how these consumers are discussing and interacting with their brands on platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram is a key part of their strategy.
Coca-Cola analysed engagement with over 120,000 pieces of social content to understand the demographics and behavior of its customers and those discussing their products. Using Computer Vision to process these social media posts, combined with deep analysis of engagement metrics, Coca-Cola used the insights to get on top of the soft drinks market. With better, more timely insights into what consumers like, they create content that gets higher than average engagement, leading to greater brand affinity, and more sales.
Advice Track
The goal of all social media marketing is conversion of one kind or another. And conversion comes down to knowing your market. Where they focus their attention. What message they want to hear. And what new information they need in order to act.
Having the answers to these questions enables you to know your consumers better and build a deeper, more profitable relationship with them over the long term. If you're ready to move in this direction, it's quite easy to get started. One of our experts will show you how.