In the report, ?You Are Missing Social Content,? Forrester explains that some companies may be able to identify new uses for products that they had not imagined before from images on social media, which can tell stories about consumer innovation in new and clearer ways than text can. It is not a matter of if visual analytics will be important for a particular brand but when, per the report. 

?Consumers who communicate with brands using images instead of words bring new context about themselves, products, and experience to the brand,? said Allison Smith, an analyst at Forrester Research, Cambridge, MA, and author of the report. 

?Some brands won?t need to adopt visual social technology within the next few years, and some should adopt it immediately,? she said. 

Social listening?
Most brands have been listening to social data for about 10 years, but when it comes to visual social listening, the early adopters are mostly limited to consumer packaged goods and fashion marketers. This could be a problem for some brands as consumers increasingly embrace visually driven social networks such as Tumblr, Pinterest and Instagram. 

Despite several challenges surrounding visual social analytics, Forrester urges that brands quickly get up to speed. 

Brands are increasingly active on visual social media sites. Of the top 50 brands that Forrester tracks in its Social WebTrack study, 58 percent maintain Instagram accounts and they post an average of 5.6 times per week. 

Customer insights?
Marketers, for the most part, are doing a good job of monitoring conversations on Twitter and Facebook that are directed at the brand, hashtagged conversations and tracking sentiment as well as share of voice.

A key part of marketers? success with social listening has been having at least one customer insights professional leading a listening strategy and interpreting the data to deliver insights to the business. 

However, often brands do not have a big enough social media strategy staff to handle visual social content as well. 

Additionally, marketers often do not recognize just how important visual networks have become for their customers. 

Beyond selfies?
Certainly brands targeting tweens, teens and young adults need to be paying to attention to visual content on social networks. 

Brands targeting older demographics could also benefit from a visual social content strategy. These marketers may have not have a lot of followers on networks such as Instagram, but the quality of the insights delivered by engaging with these consumers makes up for this shortcoming, with engagement rates on Instagram at 4.21 percent versus 0.07 percent on Facebook, per the report. 

Visual content does not refer just to encouraging consumers to take selfies with a product - which may not be appropriate for all brands. For example, brands can pick up a mention in the form of a display ad that appears in the background of another image, such as a photograph of a sports stadium, which could contain many visual mentions of brands. 

There are three primary types of visual mentions, per Forrester. 

In one type, a consumer may not mention a brand but the image being posted includes a brand logo. 

In another, the focus of a post is on a product and its use, but without the image, it would be impossible for the marketer to know what the consumer was posting about. 

In the third, images connected to a life event can be leveraged to understand more about consumers, such as that they are getting married or having a baby and which brands they like. 

Visual data a necessity
?The marketplace for analyzing visual social content is still developing. Not too long ago the vendors focused on textual social data were not looking at visual content, but given how quickly the market is developing, they are now looking to expand here, per Forrester. 

Marketer should also keep in mind that customer insight professionals versed in textual listening may not be able to recognize some of the ramifications of visual content. 

?There?s no doubt about it: You need visual data about your customers,? Ms. Smith said. ?Capturing the comments and captions isn?t enough, and in many cases it leaves the most important part of the conversation - its impetus - unknown.?