The era of visual social analytics is fast approaching.
Social listening/intelligence/monitoring (or whatever you call it) has been around for years. The tools that help to capture and organise social media mentions have evolved, but the basics of what they do – keyword searching – hasn’t really changed.
But image recognition is going to be a game changer. With the likes of image-led Instagram fast becoming people’s social network of choice, the ability to see when a brand appears is extremely exciting. Of course the next challenge will be how well the  machine is able to provide context… but one step at a time.