A huge part of social media is devoted to business and marketing, with brands often seeking to connect with their fans in order to drum up business leads. And these firms would find it vastly more efficient if they were able to see who’s talking about them.
Tumblr is responding to this desire by giving companies the ability to spot their own logos in blogs, according to Marketing Magazine. Thanks to a deal with Crimson Hexagon, a software firm, brands will be able to search Tumblr’s vast blog database to spot useful information among its users for brand-marketing purposes.
Crimson Hexagon gains access to Tumblr’s so-called “firehose,” which lets it view real-time data from all the site’s blogs. This data identifies who is sharing a brand’s logo in their blog posts, an dhow many times they are doing so. Other important brand data that can be accessed include frequently mentioned topics, brand sentiment, and the number of brand mentions.
This is part of a broader, analytics movement toward the so-called “visual Web,” which is defined as measuring brand popularity by visual data instead of sheer numbers. Proponents of this visual Web argue that this approach to metrics empowers brands with better and more well-rounded insight into how their products and services are being used by social media participants. Other benefits include being able to much more quickly see how rivals are doing and the number of brand associations they may have with other companies.
Spotting the number of times brand logos are shared is vital to marketing departments because it can direct further research concerning who’s doing the sharing. For instance, if somebody shares a Pepsi logo, does that make them a soda drinker or just a casual appreciator of the brand? Going through their account’s images, for instance, could shed further light on this to help brands segment their customers and fans.
Other social media sites, such as Instagram, also let data partners like Crimson Hexagon provide this logo-identification service to companies.
