Visual-marketing platform Chute launches Insights to better navigate the visual flood

With cameras everywhere, the flood of visual communications between consumers is a tidal wave of opportunities for marketers.

But first you need a way to quickly navigate the waters. Today, visual marketing automation company Chute is launching a public beta of its Insights tool, so that marketers using its platform can better search and filter a real-time stream of photos and videos.

“Visual content is a higher level of engagement” by consumers with products and brands, cofounder and chief technical officer Greg Narain told VentureBeat.

But, he added, “a lot of our customers were struggling to keep up with the pace of visual content.”

The company’s main product, Workspace, provides execution tools for clearing rights for visual content with consumer creators, handling the workflow, or engaging with fans at scale through automated posts. Marketers can use it to track images related to a given hashtag, or follow content uploaded to a brand’s website.

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Insights, Narain said, “is trying to broaden the funnel” by enabling searching for topics or people as well as tracking visual content by a brand or industry. You can sort results by engagement, defined here as related likes, comments, and replies.

You can also filter content by sentiment, purchase intent, geography, the most influential content creators, and emerging trends. You can then publish the selected content, with rights cleared if the brand requires it, to marketing channels using Workspace or other platforms.

In this first release, Insights scans Twitter and Instagram, although the company said it will add more platforms.

For New York’s Fashion Week, for instance, Insights determined that the most effective shared visual content related to a model in terms of likes and comments was for Gigi Hadid and for a brand was TopShop.

In a way, the launch of Insight parallels the release this week of an advanced search engine by social analytics and display platform Wayin. In both cases, the companies decided their next step was a major upgrade in their capability to find and sort material from social media.

Narain contrasted Chute’s offerings to Salesforce’s Radian6 and similar social listening platforms, noting that Chute is visually focused.

Other platforms, like Thismoment, also cover visual user-generated content, but Narain said Chute’s technology goes beyond that platform’s ability to target “a specific need.”

“Our ability to monitor the visual universe is far more sophisticated that what anyone else is doing,” he said. As an example, he noted that Insight’s Prisms function can sort content into categories as it arrives, including sorting by different kinds of perceived sentiment.

“Social media managers can use us for the brand lift, [monitoring] how competitor’s campaigns are performing” in comparison, he said, or Insights can be employed to find the most valuable sharers, the influencers. He also pointed to creative marketers’ ability to search for an idea using the new functionalities, and to get some sense of how that idea is visualized in social posts.