Crimson Hexagon boosts its visual recognition of social pics

Images have become central to social conversations, and social intelligence platform Crimson Hexagon has boosted its image analysis to keep up.

The Boston-based firm says it is now the only social platform that offers image analysis of faces, scenes, objects and activities, as well as logos. Previously, Crimson only offered recognition of logos in images, which the company says is where most of its major competitors still are.

Some competitors do logo analysis, senior vice president of product Errol Apostolopoulos told me, and at least one — Sysomos — provides facial analysis.

Some smaller social platforms have recently added more advanced image analysis. For instance, influencer platform Linqia has photo analysis, and influencer tool Dovetale provides image matching. User-generated content platform Chute features logo, object and scene detection.

But Crimson Hexagon says these aren’t enterprise platforms, and they don’t offer photo analysis down to the object, scene, activity or face, in addition to logo. Here’s a Crimson Hex screen:

To search by image, a brand selects a term from more than 2,500 filters. For instance, Apostolopoulos said, a brand could search Crimson’s database for all textual conversations relating to coffee.

It can then find any images in those textual conversations that show, for instance, a beach, or a group of people. Crimson analyzes over 125 million images daily on Twitter, Facebook, Tumbler, Weibo, blogs, articles, forums and some Pinterest pages through users’ access, and Apostolopoulos said new filters will be added quarterly.

A liquor company, he said, might want to have a dominant presence in socially posted photos of beer cans at sporting events. An analysis — typically going back three years for images, 10 for text — can give some guidance about campaign strategy or product development to increase or maintain that visibility.

Or a food company might want to see how a product is actually eaten, such as how often and what kinds of fruits are usually added to yogurt.

For now, Crimson Hexagon’s new image analysis is focused on photos, although there is beta testing with some customers of similar analysis for video. Apostolopoulos said video analysis should be out early next year.