Dovetale launches tool for automatically finding influencers through photo-matching

To build a marketing campaign employing influencers, a brand first must find the right ones.

Usually, brands locate influencers by searching through their textual posts, their specialized topics, their number of followers, their previous campaigns or similar text-and-number factors.

Today, influencer tool provider Dovetale is launching a recommendation tool that lets brands find influencers through image-matching. Founder Mike Schmidt told me this was the first of its kind.

A brand uploads an image, which is scanned and analyzed by Dovetale’s platform. The analysis presents the degree of confidence in the recognition of objects or people in the image, up to 100 percent, and the brand can confirm that, say, the detected watermelon in the image is actually a watermelon. The brand can also enter keywords to help with the search.

The platform then searches for qualified influencers across four social platforms — YouTube, Instagram, Twitch and Twitter — who have posted images with similar imagery and a similar look-and-feel. Schmidt said Facebook is being added soon.

In the following screen shots, a brand uploads the “seed” image, followed by a screen showing an influencer with similar images.

Dovetale qualifies an influencer through a score that evaluates likes and comments compared to number of followers to determine engagement, including an assessment of how many of those followers are actually bots.

This photo-matching recommendation engine has been in a beta phase with selected brands for about a month, Schmidt said. He noted that one unnamed client was looking for influencers who were into do-it-yourself projects, so it uploaded and then matched photos showing spread-out materials to make party hats. Dovetale doesn’t yet have stats on whether this photo-matching works better than other methods for finding influencers.

In addition to the new recommendation engine, the 2015-founded Dovetale offers tools for finding influencers primarily with keywords and social metrics, for managing influencers, for making Stripe-based payments and for receiving performance reports.