#visual social

Who can keep track of all those images?

Machines can — or, more accurately, machines equipped with image-recognition software that can “look” at images and make sense of what’s in them.

As image-recognition software grows ever more powerful thanks to artificial intelligence deep learning techniques, consider the ways in which the marketing world will be transformed:

Visual Trendspotting

Nearly 20 years ago in a New Yorker article titled "The Coolhunt," Malcolm Gladwell wrote of a new class of market researchers he dubbed “coolhunters.” It’s hard to imagine now, but this was in a dial-up world where Google didn’t yet exist.

Social media helped make the art and science of trendspotting easier — or at least more comprehensive and widespread. Plenty of marketers now use social listening tools to identify market trends, but those tools remain, for now, largely text-centric: They tune into what consumers are saying.

But with more and more consumers using social media to show rather than tell (think of the Millennials who live on Instagram and Snapchat), image recognition has the potential to deliver unprecedented insights into what’s actually happening in the marketplace by tuning into what consumers are showing in the pictures they share.

In the fashion world, for instance, image recognition will be able to tell us what styles and brands of clothing people are really wearing in specific cities and across regions. Companies in the design space like Pantone — which each year announces a “color of the year” in advance to great fanfare — will have the ability to detect what hues are actually rising and falling in fashion and products, in real time, across millions of up-to-the-minute images.

Evaluating Products In Use

Image-recognition software is growing better and better at product recognition, thanks to visual cues like distinct shapes and logos that can be algorithmically codified. It’s also getting ever-better at deciphering context.

If you’re a marketer, you want to know exactly how and when consumers are using your product. When a suburbanite buys a 4x4, for instance, is it actually for frequent offroading, or is it more of a lifestyle statement? Image recognition will be able to tell us, no doubt because that driver will be sharing images containing that car on social media.

Gauging Consumer Satisfaction

Every consumer who has a late-model smartphone is carrying around a computer equipped with basic image-recognition software. When you point your phone at your friends to take their picture and the built-in camera squares off their heads so as to automatically set the focus on their faces, that’s image recognition at work.

More powerful computers running more powerful software — like the machines and algorithms that are part of Microsoft’s Project Oxford — can not only identify faces but detect the emotions being expressed by those faces, including happiness, sadness, anger and contempt.

Imagine a world in which marketers can supplement — or even bypass — focus groups, surveys and other market-research tools in favor of image-recognition technology that can make sense of both products in use and the mood of the consumers using those products.

It’s coming.

These days marketers take for granted that social is the essential new arena for market research. But as visual social continues to take off — and next-generation image recognition makes sense of it — the world of market intel is poised for a whole new revolution.

1. The 10/20/30 Rule

When it comes to presentations, most of us tend to get caught up with length. We want to pack as much information in to keep the reader engaged and make it worth their while. In fact, so many of us suffer from this that Venture Capitalist Guy Kawasaki, who has listened to thousands of entrepreneurs pitch their companies, created a solution after being tired of sitting through these long, drawn out presentations. It’s called the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint: 10 slides, 20 minutes and 30 point font.

Kawasaki says the 10 slides rule comes from the idea that “a normal human being cannot comprehend more than ten concepts in a meeting.” We love this simplified formula, because it forces you to hone in on a set of key points and focus on delivering these well.

A shorter presentation also has two advantages when it comes to lead generation. Readers are more likely to retain your content and reach the last page where you host your CTA.

2. Find Your Aesthetic

Which Fortune 500 CEOs are most social? from Domo

Make your presentations stand out by following a consistent, branded aesthetic. When building out your template, think about fonts, colors and imagery that reflects your brand’s personality. You might want to play around with a mix of typography, vector art and high-res stock photography as well to find the right combination.

Domo’s SlideShare presentations are simple but so well branded that the cover slide is recognizable by the style alone. You’d probably be able to point out a Domo slide even without seeing the logo! Domo’s SlideShare presentations use the brand’s baby blue as the background color and fun vector art throughout. This makes it easier for followers to scroll through their feeds and immediately pick out Domo content.

3. Create A Click-Worthy First Impression

3 Storytelling Tips - From Acclaimed Writer Burt Helm from Ethos3

Cover pages really help set the stage. A good cover hooks the reader in and lets them know exactly what to expect in the slides to come. Let’s take a look at some of our favorite techniques for creating a catchy cover page:

This heavily viewed presentation from Ethos3, “3 Little Things I Know About Storytelling”, uses high-res imagery with a punchy headline in a simple font. To date, it has received over 72,000 views.

The Three Lies About your Age from Sean Si

This other presentation from TEDx Youth, “3 Lies About Your Age”, currently featured on the SlideShare homepage, uses a dynamic overlay of colors, shapes and fun calligraphy to catch the reader’s attention.

4. Repurpose & Optimize

With 60 million monthly users, SlideShare can help you tap into a new audience base. Amplify your existing content by repackaging it in presentation form. The Bitly team uses SlideShare to syndicate our top performing ebooks, webinars and other premium content. We’ve found the most optimal file format is a PDF that’s 1024 pixels wide by 768 pixels tall.

We’ve also found that the six most-used tags on SlideShare are business, statistics, social media, market trends, and research.

5. The Cherry On Top: A Compelling CTA

So now that you’ve created a catchy presentation, don’t forget to follow through with a compelling call-to-action (CTA) in the last page and the caption!

Use a Bitlink to drive readers to a landing page or sales page to further engage them. You can customize the back half to make it even more memorable in case they decide to come back at a later time. In our “7 Ways To Step Up Your Instagram Marketing Game” presentation, we tagged on the Bitlink “bitly.is/igmarketing2016” so that readers who were interested in learning more about Instagram Sponsored Ads could head over to our webinar to pick up more tips on creating engaging content, partner campaigns and more. We can then count the clicks on that Bitlink to see how many people are coming to the webinar from SlideShare.

B2B’s Visual Social Tool

Instagram and Snapchat might rule the consumer world, but SlideShare reigns supreme in the B2B space. SlideShare receives 500% more traffic from business owners than Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Jake Wengroff, formerly Global Director, Social Media Strategy and Research at Frost & Sullivan, also said SlideShare gave his company thousands of qualified leads a year, and a 50x return on investment.

So if you want to target B2B, there may be no better place to go than SlideShare. And all you have to do is repurpose existing content into an engaging, branded presentation template.