Image analysis with Visual Insights

Find out how YouScan detects logos, objects, scenes, people and other elements in images

Alina Kostygina avatar
Written by Alina Kostygina
Updated over a week ago

YouScan finds over 100 million social media posts every day, with over half of them being images. Research shows that the majority of photos published on social media don't explicitly mention brands anywhere in the captions. So, how can you avoid missing out on important data and remain on the same page with your customers? 🤔

The Visual Insights (VI) feature reveals how your brand's products are handled by people in their everyday lives. Visual mentions can help brands create products and services that are truly customer-focused and will draw in the desired target audience. 

In this article, we will review:

How the Visual Insights technology works and which plans have access to it

We developed a technology that utilizes machine learning to recognize and identify visual content in order to monitor images with brand logos and extract visual insights. 

The Visual Insights function consists of two components:  

  1. The visual insights themselves - detection of objects, scenes and actions in images. This function is available to subscribers of the Insight, Listen, Analyze and Innovate pricing plans.

  2. Logo recognition in images. This function can be included in the topic on a paid basis in Insight, Listen and Analyze plans, It is also included to Innovate pricing plan.
    To enable logo recognition in your topics, send us the logo you wish to monitor to us via chat or email support@youscan.io.

Which tasks can be solved with the help of VI

  1. Get the full picture of discussions around your brand on social media.
    Learn what your customers think of you, even if they haven't written a word.

  2. Find previously unknown influencers.
    Identify existing brand advocates. 

  3. Measure ad campaigns.
    Tracking both branded and user-generated content will help you assess the real reach of your campaigns.

  4. Calculate ROI from sponsorships.
    Understand who has seen your logo and how many times they've seen it.

  5. Analyze use cases.
    Get insights about who, when, where, and - most importantly - how people use your products.

How to use the Filters and Analytics functions

Filters

  1. Go to the Visual Insights section of Analytics to see the best examples of VI in action.

  2. Press "Choose".

   3. Go to the Visual tab and select your desired criteria.


💡For example, let's say you need to determine what food is most often consumed with your drinks. To do so, you'll need to select "food" in the Object filter:

Below, we will break down each filter in greater detail 👇


🤖If you notice an incorrect characteristic – you can change it. Click on the picture and select the correct description from the drop-down list. This will help our algorithm to do better next time.

Visualization

In the Overview tab, objects, scenes, activities, people and logos from all the visual content YouScan has collected are displayed in a bubble graph. You can see who appears in photos that mention your brand and what they are doing in these photos, and analyze any emerging trend with a single mouse click:

The Engagement chart helps you understand which image mentions in your topic were getting the most engagement. The system analyzes the audience's reaction to the mentions, based on this data, a graph is built. The more engagement an image mention has, the higher it will appear on the chart.

By default, the graph displays all categories of images, the switches are located below the graph. You can disable certain categories by clicking on their name. When you click on a category, the category points will disappear from the chart, and the button will turn grey.

When you hover over the dot, you see the number of mentions and engagement with the image.


Description of filters

To illustrate the VI function clearly and productively, let's examine each filter using Starbucks as an example.

Type

Mentions can be divided into illustrations (collages or photos that feature text) and photos (user-generated photos).

💡For example, you could be looking for colorful photos of people interacting with your brand to feature in a new blog post:

Subtype

This filter allows you to narrow down the types of publications you want to analyze. You can find out whether images of your brand appear in selfies, screenshots, cartoons or other types of photo.

Logo

This is a very useful tool to find out which brands often appear beside yours in user photos. Perhaps this could lead to opportunities to collaborate on a marketing campaign!😊

☝️ You can add the logo you want to monitor to an existing topic or add it when creating a new topic.

Object

This filter can help determine which objects surround your brand: what kind of clothing, method of transportation or foods often appear in photos?

Scene

Often people run in for a cup of Starbucks coffee in the morning to wake up on their way to work. Perhaps not so obvious is the scene when friends choose Starbucks as their place to hang out.

Person

Modern technology allows us to determine both the person's gender and their approximate age group: toddler, child, youth or senior. You can also guess their occupation or hobby.

💡For example, you can see how many musicians prefer your clothing brand: 

Activity

What are people doing in photos that receive the highest engagement? What kind of activity is your brand associated with? Our algorithms can recognize activities such as running, cycling, cooking, public speaking, swimming, driving and 60 others in images.

Color

If you want to see which drink color is the most popular among your customers, you can filter images by color:

You can also easily combine several Visual Insights filters. For example, here are the photos of a drink on the background of the street:

Search by images

If you need to track how a recent popular visual image is growing and evolving, you can use the search by images, which has 2 options:

1. Use any image as a query. We can collect similar images to the topic by reference images.
Send us the image you want to find on chat or on support@youscan.io, and we will create a topic for you in which we will collect all mentions with this image.

2. Collect images that are associated with arbitrary text queries. This allows for more accurate and sophisticated image searches than traditional keyword-based search methods.

For example, you need to understand what drinks are most often photographed on Christmas. Write to us on chat or on support@youscan.io, that you want to find images by request “Christmas drinks” and get a selection of popular photos with Christmas drinks.

☝🏻 Currently, we can’t collect history for such topics.

To set up such a topic or If you have any other questions, reach out to us via chat

Wishing you a great day and cool insights 😉

Did this answer your question?