It may sound like fortune cookie wisdom, but the core audience of any major media has its own particular style of sharing opinions and making purchasing decisions. Even the same person may act a bit differently when posting on several platforms at the same time. With images or video content, the difference is even more obvious, and if you fail to monitor these media, you can easily miss out on some unique types of customer feedback.
Imagine waking up in a hotel room at a tropical resort and trying to figure out what the sea’s like today, without getting out of bed. You can probably see the blue sky and the palm tree tops through the window, but the lower part of the landscape remains out of reach. This is a lot like performing media listening without scanning visual content.
Visual mentions are no less important than verbal. Knowing where your logo popped up recently or why your innovative leather purse design got a round of cheesy jokes on some Aussie YouTube channel can bring an immense amount of context to your marketing team. Tracking visual mentions means you won’t miss any influencer championing your workout app, or any disappointed customer sharing a photo of himself setting your new coffee table on fire.
Seeing only a part of the picture is not inherently bad. It won’t necessarily skew the results, at least not drastically. But that way, you simply leave too much commercial space out of your analytics. Some social listening tools focus only on text-based content, while others take care of all things graphical, and then there are services like Smelter, offering both options in one package.
- No matter the setup, you’d better find room for tracking all types of social content, be it text, pictures, or videos.
- Each content type can provide unique insights. The more content types and sources you follow, the closer you get to the whole picture.
- Getting all these options in one package is not mandatory. It just simplifies the process.
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