Social media is big data. Every 60 seconds, Facebook users share 2,460,000 pieces of content and Yelp receives 26,380 reviews. Don’t forget about the 2 million blog posts created each day and the 1 billion websites available for us to peruse.

With all of this content floating around the Internet, digital marketing struggles to truly engage and convert an increasingly fragmented online audience. Reliance on manual processes to seek out and engage with relevant social media posts is not enough. Therefore, there is a growing demand for applications that allow digital marketers to automatically understand the content shared about their brand, pinpoint the users to target, and market to them in a personalized way.

IBM Watson has multiple services to understand and target audience for social media marketing. The technology can do this by identifying trends and insights in the unstructured data, such as blog posts, Tweets, emails, and more. These insights allow marketers to make more accurate and efficient engagement decisions, such as who to interact with on social or which audience cohort should receive a specific e-mail.

Here are examples of two services that digital marketers have used to do just that:

1. Personality Insights

The Personality Insights API analyzes personality attributes from the text, such as social posts or emails, to help discover insights about people. It allows users to uncover a deeper understanding of people’s personality characteristics, needs, and values to drive personalization. The service outputs a profile that is comprised of personality characteristics from three dimensions: the Big 5 personality traits (the most widely used model for generally describing how a person engages with the world), values, and needs. Personality Insights helps marketers capture a holistic understanding of their audience with available social media data and demographic information. By understanding their consumers, marketers are enabled to create personalized interactions that ultimately improve conversion rates.

2. Vision Recognition

The Vision Recognition API recognizes objects in pictures and can be trained to generate custom classifiers. When you upload a photo, Watson will return relevant terms representing things it sees in the photos such as objects or events. You can train Watson on a specific set of images – such as a logo – for custom real-time image recognition at your fingertips. Vision recognition has helped brand marketers automatically detect what their consumers are posting about on social media, to more effectively target and engage their audience. Try it out here.

The Personality Insights and Visual Recognition APIs are just 2 IBM Watson services that harness big data to create innovative digital marketing solutions. Create your own marketing application today by using these APIs on the Watson Developer Cloud.

Hayley Yudelman