Enterprise marketing teams rely heavily on social media to assess consumer sentiment, but the monitoring tools used for the task typically only track the part of the conversation that is communicated in written form. As a result, they overlook a major source of insight: the more than 3 billion photos that are posted on a daily basis.

Crimson Hexagon Inc. is taking a shot at eliminating this blind spot. The social media analytics provider today launched a service that uses computer vision to analyze the media content shared by consumers. Its algorithms draw upon a database of more than one trillion posts to identify points of interest.

Companies can harness the tool to look for practically any object or scene that might be of relevance to their marketing efforts. Manufacturers, for instance, might use it to gain a better understanding of online interest around their products. A resort chain could check what attractions are photographed the most and incorporate the biggest draws into its ads.

Moreover, Crimson Hexagon says that the service has uses outside the marketing department as well. The perhaps most notable is quality assurance: Companies can examine photos that feature their merchandise to determine how often potential defects appear. 

To streamline work that requires such a detailed view, Crimson Hexagon has included a tile view in the service that makes it possible to quickly sift through images. The interface also provides filtering options for removing entries that aren’t needed for the specific task at hand. And in cases where a higher-level view is needed too, built-in data visualizations highlight important patterns such as such how often a certain type of image shows up.

These features are intended to help Crimson Hexagon better stand out in the crowded social media monitoring market. There aren’t many other providers that support in-depth image analysis, but the field can be expected to become more crowded over time given the rapidly growing interest around computer vision and other types of artificial intelligence.

Image: Simon/Pixabay