A week after Crimson Hexagon Inc. introduced a service that uses artificial intelligence to analyze the media content posted on social networks, a major player is joining the fray.

Salesforce.com Inc. today unveiled a tool called Einstein Vision for Social Studio that will enable users of its marketing platform to track the images that consumers share online. The tool is powered by a computer vision service that the company launched earlier this year for use by application developers. AI currently falls short of humans when it comes to interpreting visual information, but the sheer amount of posts on social media balances out the accuracy issues to a great degree.

Companies can use the new tool to put the statistics they collect about text-based posts into better context. As an example, a sportswear company could tally up Twitter mentions with the number of times that its logo appears in user images to create a more complete picture of engagement. The marketing team might then consult the results to assess the impact of a recent social media campaign.

Alternatively, the same data could be employed to compare how well a brand is doing versus the competition. Plus, Salesforce says that Envision Vision for Social Studio is also useful for tasks that require a thorougher view of user activity thanks a preprogrammed visual lexicon.

The tool can recognize 1,000 different objects, 200 foods and 60 scenes along with more than 2 million logos. A restaurant chain might use this capability to check what types of dishes attract the most attention from consumers, information that could contain insight into seasonal changes in demand. Salesforce sees companies in other industries applying the tool to their own specific focus areas.

Einstein Vision for Social Studio only works with Twitter on launch, but ZDnet reported that Salesforce plans to add other platforms to the roster in the future. It can also be expected to widen the range of objects that the service is capable of recognizing to reach more markets. The latter point is particularly important in view of the competition from Crimson Hexagon, not to mention the other social media monitoring providers that will inevitably join the computer vision race further down the road.

Image: Pixabay