• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, July 18, 2013

Adobe Systems released an updated version of its social media platform Thursday allowing marketers to predict the effectiveness of posts before they are published.

Using predictive analytics, the feature in Adobe Social learns as it goes, refining recommendations and increasing intelligence with each action. The platform pulls in historic data from similar posts and integrates it with image data on Flickr, check-ins on Foursquare and videos from Instagram, to determine the outcome for sharing, comments, and likes.

Adobe Social will also add the ability to publish content and analyze metrics associated with LinkedIn Company Pages and Groups. Bill Ingram, vice president, product management at Adobe, believes these additions will help marketers build a more complete understanding of the consumer.

The connections support existing integration with Facebook, Google+, Reddit, Tumblr, Twitter and others to offer marketers a better understanding of social conversations, consumer behavior and real-time trends.

Aside from providing insight on when and how the post can drive the most engagement, the platform offers a mobile user interface, streamlined reporting and new collaborative features. The next step will become predicting engagement for convergence.

Ingram said the new tools add data to workflows, allowing marketing analysts to find anomalies and then collaborate to quickly make changes.

Adobe Social leverages the company's Marketing Cloud interface, allowing marketers to monitor the social networks from any device. A Forrester Research survey of 382 global business decision-makers suggests that understanding how customers and prospects use social media should be the first step in designing a social media campaign. According to the researcher, 98% of business decision-makers at least read blogs, watch videos, or listen to podcasts.