Unfortunately, you can’t just rely on your company’s marketing team to create great content that will make your target audience invested in the company. Getting a person to vouch for and represent your brand can be a great way to connect with your audience and reach a new group of users. You can create an image of your brand in different ways, and one of them is having a brand ambassador or representative. But first, you need to be sure that your brand ambassadors express emotions in a way that fits your brand.
If you want to choose brand ambassadors to represent you on social media and post sponsored content, then you need to be sure that they’re going to do it right. There’s more to choosing the right brand ambassador than their popularity or engagement; you need to know if they will fit with the image your brand wants to create. After all, emotional likeability will be important for ads to increase sales.
One of the best ways of doing that is by looking through their social media profiles and checking what kind of image they’ve created for themselves. Are they generally posting content where they are happy? They might actually be more volatile and angry on their social media profiles, and that’s not going to be a great look for your brand. You would have to find that out before starting to collaborate with them.
It’s entirely possible to find out what kind of emotions your potential brand ambassador shows to their audience. The only problem is that it’ll take you a long time to collect all of the data yourself, rate the images as any specific emotion, and then analyze them. Why not let artificial intelligence make your job a little easier?
Keep reading to find out how machine learning can help you get one step closer to picking the right brand ambassador, influencer, or representative.
Brand ambassadors, leaders, and the face of your brand
In the last few years, we’ve seen a rise in both influencer marketing and CEOs representing their brands. Elon Musk and Richard Branson are two well-known CEOs that keep making appearances in the media. Even though they’re both quite successful, the image they cultivate for themselves is pretty different, whether they’re aware of it or not.
Here’s an example of the analysis that we performed on Richard Branson’s Instagram profile. You can see what emotions appeared the most below:
How their appearances are received on social media eventually impacts how customers and investors will feel about their respective companies.
On the other hand, it isn’t just about who your leaders are, it also matters for influencers. There has to be a good emotional fit between your company and those you chose to present it. Researchers found that the fit between the influencer and brand managed to improve the effectiveness of advertising. The takeaway is that it’s crucial to plan ahead and make sure every part of your communication fits together.
You wouldn’t really want to pick an influencer that is constantly moody or angry on their social media if you’re trying to spread more positivity in your own communication. Likewise, you would be wary of picking an influencer that seems to be consistently laughing and smiling, never showing neutrality, when you want to pick them to speak about a serious cause.
For example, choosing someone like Emma Watson to be a UN Ambassador was a great choice. She avoids controversies, regularly finds ways to empower women and other causes on her social media profiles. Generally, she seems to have been a good match!
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On the other hand, your own leaders might be missing the emotional mark. Unfortunately, Lucy & Yak were doing well until they got into controversies regarding size inclusivity and unpaid emotional labor. They released a longer video explaining their side of the story but the outcome was negative. Their followers either took to attacking the other person involved or they were disappointed and unfollowed them. The criticism was that they didn’t seem aware of how they were coming across. This just goes to show that whoever represents your brand needs to be more aware of how they present themselves and their reactions on social media.
Using emotion recognition to make the choice
The goal of this type of analysis is to find out:
- How many times did specific emotions appear in images and videos, and for how long?
- How did the audience’s impressions change throughout the duration of a video (or ad)? When did they react positively and negatively to what they saw?
- What emotions do the faces of your brand show in their communication? How might this influence your brand’s perception?
You might have more specific questions or goals regarding how emotions are presented on your social media channels. Fortunately, it’s possible to answer these questions since these models can be altered to fit each brand’s needs.
The AI model will use factors, like the location of your eyebrows, to try to figure out what emotional expression you have. For now, these models detect neutrality, happiness, sadness, surprise, fear, disgust, anger, and contempt.
If you want to learn more about our emotion extraction model, we recommend checking our other post about defining emotion recognition on image posts. The gist of it is that our model takes some input image, the faces get detected and cropped out, and their emotions are classified.
No need to worry about how comparable the models are, Sotrender’s model’s accuracy can be compared to the state-of-the-art models at this point in time.
There is still some work to be done in order to get the most accurate results. Emotion recognition technology relies on people labeling data, who may sometimes have different interpretations. At some point, there will be more refined ways to measure and categorize emotions, as well as improved detection of emotions in people of color. It’s only a matter of time, but the models are headed in the right direction.
Start using artificial intelligence to improve brand representation
When you don’t consider your audience’s emotions in your communication, you run the risk of damaging your brand’s image. All of the time and resources you put into planning and implementing your strategy would just be wasted. That’s why we emphasized analyzing more than just your social media analytics. Instead, take a closer look at how your content might be received by your audience. It’s best to prevent a PR nightmare from occurring, so you should really take care to ensure the right person represents your brand.
Feel free to contact us if you want to see how emotion recognition could help your own company. We’re just one click away! 🙂
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