Talkwalker: A Comprehensive Social Analytics Platform Powered by Image Recognition Technology and AI

TL; DR: Talkwalker’s end-to-end social listening and analytics platform provides real-time monitoring across various geographic regions and communication channels, empowering more than 2,000 marketers to optimize their campaigns. The company’s image recognition technology allows users to unlock insights on visual messaging, while its Influencer One product makes finding, managing, and monetizing brand ambassadors a breeze. With faster, more accurate brand insights through the power of AI, Talkwalker is on a long-term mission to help global businesses enhance their data management strategies.

If Instagram has taught us anything, it’s that a picture is now worth far more than 1,000 words. Take the surprisingly infamous World Record Egg, for example. The photo of an oval, brown, lightly speckled egg on a white background is nothing spectacular. But in its mission to outrank Kylie Jenner’s most-liked Instagram post, the simple egg became worthy of almost 53 million likes.

To say that social media interactions are nuanced is an understatement. Visuals, like the egg, often carry as much social media weight as text, especially on image-based platforms like Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook. But as visual content becomes more prevalent, with 95 million photos per day posted to Instagram alone, how can marketers monitor and understand the visual conversations around their brands or products?

Talkwalker’s end-to-end social listening platform was designed to streamline that onerous task through advanced image recognition technology. “Consumers often hide brand messages in personal visuals and emojis,” said Todd Grossman, CEO at Talkwalker. “This drove Talkwalker to find a way to decipher these colorful messages for the marketing world.”

Luxembourg-based entrepreneurs Thibaut Britz and Christophe Folschette founded Talkwalker in 2008 as social media channels like Facebook and Twitter continued to gain momentum. “Brands quickly discovered that consumers were talking about them online – whether in a good or bad way,” Todd said. “Thibaut and Christophe launched an innovative online tool allowing marketing executives to closely monitor and understand the social stream around their brands or products.”

Today, the comprehensive platform allows users to monitor real-time text and visual communications around the globe. Talkwalker’s end-to-end Influencer One product makes it easy to find, manage, and monetize brand ambassadors. With faster, more accurate brand insights through the Talkwalker AI Engine, the company is committed to helping global businesses improve their data management strategies.

In our digitally driven world, it’s not uncommon to communicate through photos, especially considering that we have cameras on our computers, tablets, smartphones, and watches. “In the last five years, visual content has become prominent, as taking and posting images is the easiest way to express yourself,” Todd said.

Talkwalker’s image recognition solution combines powerful analytics with cutting-edge technology to help brands monitor images on major social media platforms. According to Todd, up to 80% of social media users do not mention brand names in the text accompanying their posts, making it difficult for businesses to get a full view of their online presence.

As a solution, Talkwalker’s Image Recognition Technology uses advanced computer vision and machine learning to identify logos present in images with 99% accuracy. Talkwalker’s robust database of 30,000 brand logos allows businesses to search for their presence in pictures from more than 10 social networks and 150 million websites. This includes access to 175 million images posted to Twitter, thanks to Talkwalker’s partnership with the network.

Marketing teams can use the tool to measure ROI by tracking their brand’s visual presence on social networks before, during, and after a campaign. Marketers can also discover user-generated content to promote their brands, track misuse of their logos, and gauge competitiveness by comparing their visual presence to that of competitors.

“At Talkwalker, we like to keep our finger on the pulse of the rapidly changing social media and online landscape, by constantly implementing newly developed social media listening technology in our wide product offerings,” Todd said. “We are thus able to deliver powerful metrics and smart insights to companies that want to be able to further protect, measure, and promote their brand.”

In today’s digital era, YouTube celebrities are often more influential than their red carpet counterparts. According to a 2015 study commissioned by Google, 70% of teenage YouTube subscribers relate to YouTube creators more than they do traditional celebrities, and 6 out of 10 subscribers say they’re more likely to follow purchasing advice from their favorite content creator than their favorite TV or movie star.

In addition, a 2017 study on the state of influencer marketing revealed that the approach is now mainstream, with 84% of marketers stating that influencer marketing is effective and 67% of marketers planning to increase influencer marketing budgets.

That said, quantifying the impact of influencer marketing campaigns can be tricky. Recognizing this, Talkwalker designed its influencer marketing hub — Influencer One — as a one-stop shop for managing relationship workflows, from identification and engagement to campaign organization and monetization.

The tool helps users monitor the conversations and interactions of complex influencer networks while fostering collaboration between marketing teams. It also features reportable metrics that illustrate the connection between influencer marketing efforts and ROI.

Creating a campaign is effortless: Select the influencers you’ll use, choose the response you want, and add your budget. From there, the influencer funnel provides an in-depth look at tracked relationships, including details on engagement rates and top influencers. For a real-time view of campaign success, the measurement metric provides an analysis of mentions, engagements, and impressions before measuring the ROI of the entire campaign.

When it comes to online conversation tracking, Talkwalker casts its net wide, analyzing 10 social networks, as well as online and offline media sources, in one platform. “Our state-of-the-art social media analytics platform uses the most advanced AI-powered technology to monitor and analyze online conversations in real-time across social networks, news websites, blogs, and forums in over 185 languages,” Todd said.

In addition to real-time social listening, Talkwalker also enables users to analyze the impact of current trends compared to two years of historical data access. Key features for trend-focused social analysis also include trend prediction charts, a virality map that illustrates how trends spread, time-lapse graphs, and automatic theme-based trend detection.

“Marketing and communications teams are the most frequent users of our platform, but our data can be rationalized and spread throughout the company, from the R&D department to the legal division, to drive new insights and lead to better decisions,” Todd said.

Around-the-clock monitoring also allows customer service representatives to respond to problems within seconds. To that end, Talkwalker’s Crisis Management Guide is an essential tool that customers can use to make the most out of the company’s services when planning for the inevitable social media disaster.

Todd said Talkwalker’s artificial intelligence capabilities are also vital to capturing accurate brand insights more quickly. “Artificial intelligence is also really a trend to watch; we will feel its impact throughout our professional lives,” he said. “This technology will reshape the whole marketing and communications sector by getting rid of routine tasks and improving data accuracy, thus allowing professionals to focus on more creative tasks.”

To that end, Talkwalker’s new AI engine leverages automation to detect relevant brand mentions with 99.5% accuracy in just 30 minutes. The tool is easy to use without prior technical knowledge, which saves time while boosting accuracy and reducing human error.

The AI-powered sentiment analysis feature uses natural language processing to put comments into context, interpreting emotions, irony, and sarcasm with an average 90% accuracy.

“We launch new features and product improvements several times a year, but we are very excited about the release of the AI engine,” Todd said. “Artificial intelligence has always been part of Talkwalker’s DNA, but in recent months we have been able to make it ever-present in our platform to help our customers automate processes through improved sentiment analysis and custom models to cut through the noise.”