Listening To Social With The Eyes: Visual Social Analytics

In social media, content is king — and the king of content is the image. Mainstream social networks Facebook and Twitter have become increasingly visual over time; Facebook added images to commenting features in June 2013, and Twitter added images to the stream just a few months later. Meanwhile, as the behemoths become more visual, entirely visual networks Instagram, Pinterest, and Tumblr continue to attract users by the millions. In the face of these changes, customer insights (CI) professionals who are accustomed to performing text analysis of social data miss out on the value contained in images. The adage "a picture is worth 1,000 words," applied to the 5,000 images of your brand posted every day (as one vendor suggests of Starbucks), indicates that CI professionals could be missing 5 million insights (surely an exaggeration, but the point that something is being overlooked still stands). To assist CI professionals, this report builds a case for monitoring visual social networks, outlines vendor capabilities, and describes the value that early-adopting brands have found in the visual social Web.