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With a previous career in agency-side digital PR, and tech journalism before that, Lance has now worked on Meltwater's marketing team for over a decade. 

Senior Content Marketing Manager

See all blogs written by Lance Concannon, Senior Content Marketing Manager at Meltwater.

Author: Lance Concannon

GEO = optimization for AI answers, not just search engines.

LLMs use training data & live web data (e.g., Bing, Google).

Most cited sources: Reddit, YouTube, newswires, Wikipedia, etc.

GEO prioritizes authority, clarity, recency, and narrative consistency.

GEO helps your brand to appear in AI platforms like ChatGPT and Google Search Summaries — but how does it work? This guide has everything you need to know to get started with GEO.

As generative AI reshapes how people research, learn, and make decisions, a new discipline is emerging: Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). Just as SEO helped brands get discovered on Google, GEO ensures they appear accurately and positively within AI-powered platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot. With millions of consumers now turning to generative engines instead of search engines, GEO is fast becoming essential for marketing and PR professionals looking to influence how their brand shows up in this new discovery layer, where conversations, not clicks, determine visibility.

What is Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)?

Why Should Marketing & Insights Teams Care About GEO?

How Does GEO Work? Key Mechanisms & Signals

What's the Difference Between GEO and SEO?

Increase Your GEO Readiness with Meltwater

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of ensuring that AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Llama, etc., provide accurate, positive, and up-to-date information about your brand when users ask questions. These platforms are referred to as Generative Engines, Answer Engines, or Large Language Models (LLMs). They are increasingly used by consumers to research purchases and make decisions.

GEO is a way of making sure that AI platforms give people the right information about a company’s brand and products. 

For example, if a person asks ChatGPT: “What is a good family car for camping trips?” then the auto manufacturers would want ChatGPT to suggest their SUV models, and list the benefits. To make sure that happens, the auto brands need to use GEO.

GEO ensures your brand shows up correctly within these AI-generated responses.

The practice of GEO involves several steps, but it is mostly focused on creating, structuring, and publishing content in the best way to influence the responses given by AI Generative Engines. 

In this article we’ll go into the detail of how GEO works, why it’s important, and how you can use it to make sure your brand is featured positively in AI platforms. 

For a long time marketers have been able to rely on the fact that consumers almost exclusively use Google to research buying decisions. So they have been able to use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to ensure their brand’s website appears in the organic search results, or use paid search advertising to buy ads on relevant search results. 

This is a highly effective way of targeting the right audience at the right time. But now things are changing. 

Changing user behavior: AI + conversational search

Increasingly, consumers are using tools like ChatGPT to research their buying decisions. Data from Meltwater’s 2026 Global Digital Report shows that ChatGPT.com is now the fifth most visited website on the web.

While search engines remain popular, many search queries now produce an AI generated summary that often provide enough information to divert users away from clicking through to websites, because their question has already been answered. McKinsey reports that around half of all Google search queries already produce AI generated summaries, and that number is increasing all the time. 

With conventional web search, consumers are performing research manually, trying to find trustworthy sources and sifting through information to reach the answers they seek. But with Generative Engines, the AI is performing the research automatically, using its existing base knowledge alongside supplemental information pulled from more recent online sources. A search engine shows users where to find answers, while a Generative Engine just gives them the answer. 

For marketers, the key takeaway is that few top-of-funnel consumers are visiting your website, because during the awareness phase their information needs are being met by Generative Engines. This makes it more difficult to move them down into the consideration phase. 

TIP: For more data around growing AI usage and online consumer behavior, download our 2026 Global Digital Report, featuring nearly 700 pages statistics to help inform your strategies next year.

You already know that everybody is talking about AI, and all of your competitors are having the same discussions as you about what it means for their marketing strategy. Those who move decisively to implement GEO, ensuring their brands are represented clearly and positively in Generative Engines, will capture the largest share of those consumers who start their buying journey with an AI query. 

Those who ignore GEO will lose ground, as growing numbers of consumers turn from search engines to Generative Engines, the size of the audiences that can be reached through conventional search marketing will decrease. 

How do generative engines (LLMs) surface content?

It’s important to understand that while Generative Engines are based on similar technology, they all work a little differently. Broadly speaking they all use two different sources of knowledge to provide an answer to a query: 

<table class="table-primary alternate-color">
  <caption>How Generative Engines (LLMs) Surface Content</caption>
  <thead>
    <tr>
      <th>Generative Engine</th>
      <th>Primary Retrieval Method</th>
      <th>Sources Most Often Cited</th>
      <th>Sources Less Likely to Be Cited</th>
      <th>Notes on Behavior</th>
    </tr>
  </thead>
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <td>ChatGPT</td>
      <td>Bing search + internal training data</td>
      <td>Reuters, AP News, Wikipedia, Encyclopedic sources</td>
      <td>Social media platforms (X/Twitter, Instagram)</td>
      <td>Prefers authoritative, neutral, structured sources with high trust signals.</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Google Gemini</td>
      <td>Google Search + YouTube + Knowledge Graph</td>
      <td>Reddit, YouTube, Google-indexed blogs</td>
      <td>X/Twitter</td>
      <td>Strongly favors user-generated content, community threads, and Google-owned properties.</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Perplexity</td>
      <td>Real-time web crawling + citation-first retrieval</td>
      <td>News publishers, reputable blogs, research papers</td>
      <td>Low-trust UGC</td>
      <td>Most transparent engine — always cites sources and updates in real time.</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Claude</td>
      <td>Internal training data + selected retrieval</td>
      <td>Academic sources, reputable news, long-form articles</td>
      <td>Short-form social media</td>
      <td>Prefers long-form text and well-structured explanatory content.</td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table>

Training Data: All LLMs begin by being trained on a huge volume of existing content and data — we’re talking about dozens of terabytes (a terabyte is 1,000Gb). This training data comes from a wide variety of sources (including your website), and gives the LLM its base knowledge about the world. The LLM does not have any knowledge of anything that happened after its initial training. 

Live Web Search: To overcome the knowledge cut-off problem, the training data is supplemented with fresh information gathered from the internet. If the Generative Engine thinks that a user’s query would benefit from more up to date information than it already has, it fetches new content from trusted online sources and works that into its response. Google uses its own search engine to find fresh information, while ChatGPT uses various sources, including Microsoft Bing.

It’s also important to note that AI does not quote any of this content verbatim in its responses. Much like a human, it uses the information it has learned to inform its own answer, and that can include information from various sources, including the press, competitors, consumer reviews. So don’t expect it to always be on-message!

Another key point is that unlike a search engine, an LLM does not have an index of content which it searches to find answers. It would be impossible to search ChatGPT for all mentions of your brand — that’s simply not how it works. 

An LLM is more similar to a human brain, in that it has a lot of knowledge stored in patterns and relationships between words and concepts. It is extremely difficult, verging on impossible, to examine and understand the detail of an LLM’s learned knowledge because of the sheer scale and complexity; this is a challenge referred to as Black Box AI. 

But we do understand how Generative Engines work at a high level, and we can analyze the kind of responses they produce for relevant queries, which gives us insight into how we should optimize our content for increased visibility.

What content features improve GEO-visibility?

Bear in mind that when you’re optimizing content for Generative Engines, the goal is to write copy that is easier for AI to digest and incorporate into its responses.

Clarity: Avoid overly elaborate language. Do not use corporate-jargon. Keep it simple, professional, and to the point. Leave no room for ambiguity. 

Authority: Wherever possible back up your statements with data from reputable sources, quotes from experts or industry leaders, and reference-able proof points. 

Structure: Organize your pages well with clear titles, headings, and subheadings. Use heading tags (H1, H2, etc) correctly to specify the hierarchy of your content. 

Recency: AI platforms look for more recent information from trusted sources to supplement their base knowledge, so in both owned and earned media, aim to publish fresh content recently.

In many respects GEO shares principles with good SEO practice. If you write consistently high quality content which addresses the needs of your target audience, and structure it correctly on well designed, standards compliant web pages, you will succeed.

First you need to understand your starting point. Meltwater’s GenAI Lens is a tool that gives brands insight into how they are discussed by all major Generative Engines, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok, and Deepseek. 

With GenAI Lens you’ll be able to understand how your brand is already featured in LLMs, what source websites are used in those responses, and whether outdated or inaccurate information is being used. 

We know that LLMs pull content from the web, which they use to inform their responses. So whatever is said about your brand online will significantly affect how Generative Engines talk about your company. 

Start with your own website, this is the first place LLMs will look for information about your organization. But also focus on trusted, high authority third party sites like the mainstream news and specialist media within your industry, because these are the kinds of sources that LLMs will use. GenAI Lens can show you which websites the leading LLMS use to source information about your brand. 

Once you have a comprehensive audit of how your brand is currently portrayed online, you can perform a gap analysis against your desired messaging, and build a plan for how to reach that objective. 

An important difference between GEO and SEO is understanding how people search differently when using Generative Engines. Users interact conversationally with AI, and are likely to ask more complex questions in natural language, compared to simple keywords or short queries in a search engine. So it’s useful to get an idea of what kind of questions people will ask about your brand or industry, to help plan your GEO content. 

Unlike search engines, at present the leading Generative Engines do not share data on popular user queries, so it’s not easy to find out exactly what people are asking about your business. But you can look at popular keyword searches associated with your brand, and brainstorm the most likely questions people will ask Generative Engines. 

You can also use a social listening platform, like Meltwater Explore+ to analyze social media conversations around your brand and industry, to gain insight into common questions. Once you have mapped out all of the most likely questions people might ask, you can start creating content that answers those questions. 

Conventional SEO was built around search queries but GEO requires thinking in concepts, context, and authority — you need to focus on the intent of the query, rather than simply trying to match keywords. 

LLMs prioritize sources that provide comprehensive, well-structured, and contextually rich content. Focus your content strategy on:

Educational depth: Long-form resources that answer questions end-to-end. Publish explainers, FAQs, and data-backed insights that answer “how” and “why.”

Credibility signals: Citations, quotes, and data from reputable sources (analyst studies, thought leadership, or trusted media).

Rich media: Generative Engines pull information from videos and images as well as text content, so make use of varied content formats. 

Consistency across channels: LLMs learn from media, social, and owned content together; ensure your narratives are aligned across them.

The key thing is to ensure that your content is genuinely helpful in answering those questions you mapped out. If your content is too focused on sales messages, it’s less likely to be used by the LLMs.

TIP: Discover innovative AI-generated content examples to enhance your digital strategy.

You can optimize the content published on your website and owned channels, but LLMs also source information from trusted third party websites. That means PR has a key role to play in ensuring your brand is featured in high authority earned media, including news features, expert comment from your spokespeople, product reviews, and any other kind of brand story traditionally generated through a media relations campaign. 

The tricky part is that unlike advertising, which can tell exciting and attention grabbing stories, PR professionals are limited to working only with the facts. But while you cannot always control the outcome of media outreach activity, ensuring that PR and GEO are aligned will help increase the volume of third party sources that feature the right messaging. 

 Meltwater’s GenAI Lens gives you the ability to track your GEO performance over time, so you can understand whether your strategy is working well and spot areas where you need to improve. The tool provides visualizations that show brand sentiment, emotion, key phrases, people, products and things mentioned, alongside citations.

Armed with this information you can identify gaps in your GEO strategy where you might need to create more or better content. You can also discover which third party sources have the greatest impact on your GEO performance, and use that information to optimize PR outreach to focus on the most important media. 

Like SEO, this is a process of constant iteration and improvement. GEO should not be seen as a one-off project that will generate positive results in perpetuity, but rather an ongoing activity that needs to be integrated with the broader marketing mix.

Which Media Sources to Prioritize for GEO

When an LLM processes a user query, it can often detect that the response might require more recent information than it has access to in its original training data. In that situation it will look online for more up to date content that will help it to form a more accurate answer, but where exactly do Generative Engines look for this information?

At Meltwater we used GenAI Lens to research which content sources the leading AI platforms were most likely to reference in their responses, and there were distinct differences between them all:

Open AI ChatGPT: Heavily favors text-based news and newswires (Reuters, AP, PR Newswire) and reference sites (Wikipedia). Much less likely to cite social media and UGC. 

Google Gemini: Leans towards high quality UGC from sites like Reddit and YouTube, as well as other online sources within the Google ecosystem. Does not index X/Twitter content. 

Google Search AI Overviews: Highly focused on UGC from Reddit and YouTube, as well as Facebook, Yahoo and LinkedIn. 

xAI Grok: Strongly skewed towards conversational UGC from X and Reddit. Less likely to cite traditional reference sources like Wikipedia, YouTube or academic sites. 

Unlike SEO, where most practitioners were happy to optimize only for Google, in GEO we have to consider the nuances of several different platforms; at the very least ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews. In short, it’s good practice to ensure you have up to date content propagated across a wide range of platforms where LLMs might look for supplemental information.  

In terms of which online sources are most likely to be referenced overall, we looked at several categories and charted the most frequently cited websites:

<ul class="medium">
	<li><b>Social Media & UGC</b></li>
    <ul>
		<li>reddit.com: 43.1%</li>
		<li>youtube.com: 17.9%</li>
        <li>facebook.com: 11.1%</li>
		<li>linkedin.com: 9.2%</li>
        <li>quora.com: 5.6%</li>
	</ul>
	<li><b>Consumer Reviews</b></li>
	<ul>
		<li>glassdoor.com: 21.6%</li>
		<li>indeed.com: 20.6%</li>
        <li>trustpilot.com: 15.7%</li>
		<li>bbb.org: 9.9%</li>
        <li>yelp.com: 8.0%</li>
	</ul>
	<li><b>Travel</b></li>
    <ul>
		<li>tripadvisor.com: 83.2%</li>
		<li>expedia.com: 10.0%</li>
        <li>booking.com: 6.8%</li>
	</ul>
	<li><b>News & Media</b></li>	
    <ul>
		<li>yahoo.com: 26.5%</li>
		<li>prnewswire.com: 10.8%</li>
        <li>reuters.com: 9.0%</li>
		<li>forbes.com: 6.7%</li>
        <li>usnews.com: 6.7%</li>
	</ul>
    <li><b>Academic & Science</b></li>	
    <ul>
		<li>nih.gov: 53.6%</li>
		<li>researchgate.net: 14.5%</li>
        <li>sciencedirect.com: 10.0%</li>
		<li>jhu.edu: 7.5%</li>
        <li>cdc.gov: 5.8%</li>
	</ul>
    <li><b>Market Research & Consulting</b></li>	
    <ul>
		<li>statista.com: 18.8%</li>
		<li>mordorintelligence.com: 16.3%</li>
        <li>gartner.com: 14.9%</li>
		<li>mckinsey.com: 13.5%</li>
        <li>cbinsights.com: 13.0%</li>
	</ul>
    <li><b>Business & Financial</b></li>	
    <ul>
		<li>investing.com: 14.1%</li>
		<li>morningstar.com: 13.2%</li>
        <li>nasdaq.com: 11.4%</li>
		<li>nerdwallet.com: 10.4%</li>
        <li>seekingalpha.com: 8.8%</li>
	</ul>
    <li><b>Government & Public Sector</b></li>	
    <ul>
		<li>weforum.org: 20.6%</li>
		<li>europa.eu: 17.8%</li>
        <li>canada.ca: 12.7%</li>
		<li>imf.org: 11.5%</li>
        <li>sec.gov: 10.1%</li>
	</ul>
</ul>

Many teams focus on keywords, backlinks, and meta tags, but LLMs prioritize context, authority, and relevance. GEO requires content that answers full questions with clear, verifiable information, not keyword stuffing or link chasing.

2. Ignoring source credibility and transparency

AI models reward trustworthy, well-cited content. Publishing unverified claims, outdated statistics, or missing citations can lower visibility or lead to inaccurate AI summaries of your brand. Always include reputable data sources, authorship, and dates.

3. Failing to monitor how your brand appears in LLMs

Without ongoing monitoring, brands miss when GenAI models misrepresent their products or replicate misinformation. LLM tracking tools like Meltwater’s GenAI Lens can surface these blind spots and help correct or update narratives quickly.

4. Producing siloed content across channels

If your website, press releases, and social media say different things, LLMs may produce inconsistent brand stories. GEO demands narrative alignment across earned, owned, and shared channels to reinforce message accuracy.

5. Neglecting freshness and structured data

Generative Engines favor current, clearly organized information. Outdated pages or unclear formatting make it harder for AI to interpret your content correctly. Keep publishing new, well-structured insights tied to recent data or trends.

6. Measuring the wrong success indicators

Traditional SEO KPIs like click-through rates or page rank don’t tell the full story. GEO should be measured by AI visibility share, narrative accuracy, sentiment, and engagement outcomes rather than traffic alone.

Avoiding these pitfalls ensures your GEO strategy builds trust, visibility, and consistency in how AI engines,  and their billions of users, perceive your brand.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a marketing discipline that has existed almost for as long as search engines themselves. The goal of SEO is to ensure that when a consumer searches for a topic relevant to your business, an appropriate page from your brand’s website is listed as close to the top of the search results as possible. SEO involves creating the right kind of content for your website, and ensuring that it is correctly structured, as well as encouraging high quality third-party websites to link to your own.

First you need to understand your starting point. Meltwater’s GenAI Lens is a tool that gives brands insight into how they are discussed by all major Generative Engines, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok, and Deepseek. 
With GenAI Lens you’ll be able to understand how your brand is already featured in LLMs, what source websites are used in those responses, and whether outdated or inaccurate information is being used. 

Benchmark current GEO performance 

We know that LLMs pull content from the web, which they use to inform their responses. So whatever is said about your brand online will significantly affect how Generative Engines talk about your company. 
Start with your own website, this is the first place LLMs will look for information about your organization. But also focus on trusted, high authority third party sites like the mainstream news and specialist media within your industry, because these are the kinds of sources that LLMs will use. GenAI Lens can show you which websites the leading LLMS use to source information about your brand. 
Once you have a comprehensive audit of how your brand is currently portrayed online, you can perform a gap analysis against your desired messaging, and build a plan for how to reach that objective. 

Audit online footprint

An important difference between GEO and SEO is understanding how people search differently when using Generative Engines. Users interact conversationally with AI, and are likely to ask more complex questions in natural language, compared to simple keywords or short queries in a search engine. So it’s useful to get an idea of what kind of questions people will ask about your brand or industry, to help plan your GEO content. 
Unlike search engines, at present the leading Generative Engines do not share data on popular user queries, so it’s not easy to find out exactly what people are asking about your business. But you can look at popular keyword searches associated with your brand, and brainstorm the most likely questions people will ask Generative Engines. 
You can also use a social listening platform, like Meltwater Explore+ to analyze social media conversations around your brand and industry, to gain insight into common questions. Once you have mapped out all of the most likely questions people might ask, you can start creating content that answers those questions. 

Map audience queries

Conventional SEO was built around search queries but GEO requires thinking in concepts, context, and authority — you need to focus on the intent of the query, rather than simply trying to match keywords. 
LLMs prioritize sources that provide comprehensive, well-structured, and contextually rich content. Focus your content strategy on:
Educational depth: Long-form resources that answer questions end-to-end. Publish explainers, FAQs, and data-backed insights that answer “how” and “why.”
Credibility signals: Citations, quotes, and data from reputable sources (analyst studies, thought leadership, or trusted media).
Rich media: Generative Engines pull information from videos and images as well as text content, so make use of varied content formats. 
Consistency across channels: LLMs learn from media, social, and owned content together; ensure your narratives are aligned across them.
The key thing is to ensure that your content is genuinely helpful in answering those questions you mapped out. If your content is too focused on sales messages, it’s less likely to be used by the LLMs.

Align content to intent, not keywords

You can optimize the content published on your website and owned channels, but LLMs also source information from trusted third party websites. That means PR has a key role to play in ensuring your brand is featured in high authority earned media, including news features, expert comment from your spokespeople, product reviews, and any other kind of brand story traditionally generated through a media relations campaign. 
The tricky part is that unlike advertising, which can tell exciting and attention grabbing stories, PR professionals are limited to working only with the facts. But while you cannot always control the outcome of media outreach activity, ensuring that PR and GEO are aligned will help increase the volume of third party sources that feature the right messaging. 

PR is essential to GEO

 Meltwater’s GenAI Lens gives you the ability to track your GEO performance over time, so you can understand whether your strategy is working well and spot areas where you need to improve. The tool provides visualizations that show brand sentiment, emotion, key phrases, people, products and things mentioned, alongside citations.
Armed with this information you can identify gaps in your GEO strategy where you might need to create more or better content. You can also discover which third party sources have the greatest impact on your GEO performance, and use that information to optimize PR outreach to focus on the most important media. 
Like SEO, this is a process of constant iteration and improvement. GEO should not be seen as a one-off project that will generate positive results in perpetuity, but rather an ongoing activity that needs to be integrated with the broader marketing mix.

Measure, iterate, improve

How Can You Get Started With GEO?

Learn how Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) helps brands appear in AI answers across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews.

What is Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)? & How to Do It

Since the beginning of this millennium, social media has grown to become a part of everyday life for around 65 percent of the global population, or 96 percent of those with internet access. It’s a powerful tool for education, entertainment, and communication, and naturally, modern consumers often use social media for customer service when they want a brand to respond to their query or complaint. 

At the same time, the rise of social media has also contributed to an environment where customer service is more important than ever. If a consumer has a bad experience with a brand, they can leave bad reviews on sites like TrustPilot, Google Reviews or Facebook, or even simply post about the problem on sites like X/Twitter or Reddit.

Too many negative comments on these channels will soon start to impact the brand’s reputation, potentially leading to fewer customers and falling revenues. So good customer service is a business critical part of the customer journey.

And that’s why social media needs to be integrated into your customer service contact center, instead of existing in a separate silo. If customers are just as likely (if not more) to voice issues on social rather than by phone or email, then it makes sense for the contact center to be able to handle social channels with the same level of efficiency as other communications. 

In this blog we’ll look into why it’s a good idea for brands to integrate social engagement into their customer care strategy, and what’s involved in building a social media contact center.

Why Use Social Media for Customer Service?

Key Features of an Effective Social Media Contact Center

Best Practices for Managing a Social Media Contact Center

Make it Simple for Customers to Reach You with Meltwater & 8x8

There are a lot of reasons to embed social media into your customer service strategy, but the foremost is its popularity. If your customers have internet access, they’re almost guaranteed to be social media users. With so many people choosing social channels, it simply makes no sense to ignore them in favor of email and telephone calls. 

In fact, there’s a unique advantage to resolving customer problems on social: visibility. Because social discussions take place in public, it’s a very transparent place to demonstrate your commitment to excellent customer service. When you take care of a customer on social media, everybody can see it, and this helps boost your brand reputation. 

It also enhances relationship building with your customers — if somebody sees a positive outcome after they engage with a company on social media, it improves their impression of the business and helps turn customers into brand advocates. 

Even better, it’s a very cost-effective way of delivering customer care. Issues that can be rapidly resolved on social channels are deflected from your contact center’s phone lines and email inboxes, reducing the level of resources required to deliver good quality customer care. 

Meet customers in their preferred channels

So it’s great for your business, but how does social media help customers? From their perspective, they get a faster response, on a channel that’s convenient to them. Nobody enjoys writing a complaint email, or dialing a call center, so if a consumer can get a fast resolution through a channel where they are already spending time, that’s a big win for them. This kind of positive, convenient resolution increases brand loyalty and customer retention. 

Social media contact center definition: A social media contact center is an evolution of conventional contact centers, in which relevant messages and comments from social channels are processed through the same systems as traditional channels like phone calls and emails. 

In practical terms this can mean technical integrations between contact center platforms like 8x8 and social media engagement tools like Meltwater’s social media management solution, enabling agents to both receive and respond to comments and DMs from their brand’s social channels.

In some cases, a social media contact center may exclusively handle social media communications, but often other channels will be handled alongside them. This means that whether customers contact the brand through a social channel, send an email, or make a call, their issue is taken care of by the same customer care team, so that a consistent level of service is delivered across all channels. 

This consistency of customer care is one of the key benefits of integrating social media into a customer contact center. It also enables integrated analytics and reporting, so it’s easier to get a 360-degree view of how customer service is performing across all channels. 

There’s another big advantage — by integrating social media with your help desk and CRM systems, you can build a more complete picture of your customers and their interactions with your organization. 

Without social media integration, an agent dealing with a customer call wouldn’t be aware that they’d made multiple previous enquiries on X, Instagram, or Facebook, which creates a poorer customer experience. But armed with that knowledge, the agents can deliver far better outcomes. 

What makes a social media contact center? As we’ve discussed, the integration of social media data and engagement capabilities with existing customer service platforms is critical because the whole idea is to ensure no matter where a customer query or complaint comes from, it receives exactly the same level of care and attention. 

So, whatever social engagement platform you’re using, it needs to be fully integrated into your help desk system so you can assist the customers via whichever channel is most convenient for them. As well as the mainstream social channels like Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube and TikTok, don’t forget about lesser known channels which are growing in popularity, like Threads and Bluesky. 

An effective social media contact center should be able to import queries from these channels into the help desk system, as well as enabling agents to respond to them from within the same system. 

This integration should also include analytics and reporting capabilities, tracking metrics like response time, sentiment, resolution rate, and customer satisfaction. Measuring these things is critical for operational efficiency, enabling you to clearly understand the contact center’s performance so you can identify optimization opportunities. 

Delivering excellent social media customer service requires strategic alignment, consistency, and customer-centric engagement. Here’s how to get it right:

1. Establish clear guidelines and response protocols

Create a comprehensive playbook that outlines how agents should handle different types of interactions (e.g. complaints, inquiries, compliments, crises). This should include:

Response templates for common issues, and links to self-serve resources

Escalation paths for sensitive or complex cases

Timeframe expectations (e.g., reply within 1 hour)

Platform-specific etiquette and tone-of-voice guidelines

Clear protocols empower agents to respond quickly and confidently, reducing errors and maintaining consistency.

2. Maintain a consistent brand voice and tone

Whether a customer interacts with your brand on Instagram, LinkedIn, or TikTok, the experience should feel familiar and on-brand, just as it does across all of your other non-social channels. Consistent CX is critical to building a strong brand. 

Core tone characteristics (e.g., friendly, professional, witty)

Do's and don’ts for language, emojis, humor, and personalization

Visual guidelines for image or video responses, if applicable

A unified voice strengthens brand trust and ensures that every touchpoint reflects your values.

3. Monitor social media channels proactively

While it’s vital to respond to comments and messages explicitly directed at your brand’s owned social channels, there are other things you should track on social, since not every relevant message will directly tag your brand. 

Emerging issues or negative sentiment spikes

Set up real-time alerts and routing systems to assign tasks quickly to the right team. Proactive brand monitoring allows you to catch issues before they escalate and engage with customers even when they don’t tag you.

4. Encourage feedback and actively engage

Don’t just wait for complaints, invite input and amplify positive engagement. Consider:

Asking for feedback after an issue is resolved

Engaging in relevant conversations, even if they’re not support-related

Amplifying positive mentions through reposts or shoutouts

Active engagement humanizes your brand, builds community, and provides valuable insight into customer needs.

5. Continuously evaluate and improve service strategies

Make analytics a core part of your operations. Track:

Customer satisfaction and sentiment trends

Regularly review these insights to refine workflows, update training materials, and test new tools or automation. Constant optimization ensures your team evolves with customer expectations and social media trends.

Meltwater’s social listening capabilities integrated with 8x8 allow agents to quickly source actionable cases from popular social media channels, as well as filter based on customized search criteria to save time and surface the most relevant and actionable social conversations. 

“Social media has become a vital channel for customer engagement, yet many contact centers still struggle to support it effectively,” said Victor Belfor, Global Vice President, Business Development and Strategic Partnerships at 8x8, Inc. “We chose to partner with Meltwater because we believe it’s one of the most powerful social listening platforms in the market. Together, we’re helping organizations stay connected with their customers by delivering best-in-class technology from a single, trusted provider.”

By leveraging a social intelligence solution like Meltwater integrated with a contact center platform like 8x8, you can deliver faster, more comprehensive, and better customer care. What’s more, you’ll reduce costs by deflecting cases from more expensive channels (calls and emails), all while improving the overall quality of your brand’s CX. 

Learn why integrating social media into your contact center boosts CX, reduces costs, and turns customer care into a brand reputation driver.

Integrating Social Media & Customer Service

Every PR executive will be aware of the truism that a reputation takes a lifetime to build, and a moment to destroy. That’s why crisis communication is one of the key responsibilities of a corporate PR team, to protect the brand’s reputation in the event of an unexpected public event that could reflect negatively on the company and its stakeholders. 

While the fun part of PR focuses on brand building, media relations, and creative campaigns, crisis communications is often seen as the less enjoyable side of the job, but it’s essential, and many executives find they relish the challenge of successfully handling a crisis under pressure. 

In this article we’ll cover all the important elements of building a crisis communication strategy so that you’re ready to deal with whatever the world throws at you.

What are the Golden Rules of Crisis Communication?

How To Develop a Crisis Communication Plan and Strategy

Measuring and Evaluating Crisis Communication

The term “crisis communication” refers to the communications activity carried out by an organization’s public relations team in response to an incident that could have a damaging effect on its reputation. 

Managing crisis communications involves: 

Ensuring that the company’s response to the crisis is fairly represented in the press 

The ultimate goal is to maintain trust with all stakeholders (such as customers, investors, employees, and partners) and to mitigate any potential damage to the company’s reputation as a result of the crisis. Sometimes it’s even possible to turn a crisis situation into a positive outcome for the brand, by handling it in a way that is authentic and transparent.

The key elements of effective crisis communication are: 

Clearly defined roles and responsibilities

An up-to-date media kit containing essential information

A well tested and regularly rehearsed plan

The benefit of having a crisis communication plan in place is simply that when the unexpected happens, you’ll be prepared for it. Maybe you won’t have predicted the exact crisis that hits your organization, but it will most likely be something similar to the possible events you will have thought about and planned for. Even being only half ready for a crisis is infinitely better than not being ready at all. 

We believe the most important rules of successful crisis communication can be distilled down to these six guidelines.

Proactivity: It’s important to always be on the front foot, both in preparing for a potential crisis and in managing one that is in play. Always be working to get ahead of the situation. 

Transparency: It’s critical that the press and your stakeholders see you being open and honest about the situation, even if things are still unclear. This will build trust. 

Empathy: Understand how the crisis is impacting other people and organizations, then demonstrate that you care about it. Don’t focus only on your own difficulties. 

Consistency: Ensure that all communications from your organization are properly coordinated so that there’s no confusion caused by people receiving inconsistent messages. 

Accessibility: Journalists and other stakeholders should be able to easily find the information they need from you across all of your channels. Equally, spokespeople should be available to answer questions as much as possible. 

Adaptability: Be ready to deal with a fast changing situation. It’s good to have a plan, but it’s also important to know when the plan needs to change.

Follow these guiding principles, and you’ll be able to stay on top of any crisis that comes your way.

Over the decades crisis communications planning has become a well defined discipline. So many organizations have had the opportunity to learn from live crisis situations that there are plenty of case studies to learn from, and best practices are widely established. 

Generally speaking a crisis comms plan will illustrate how your message will be communicated. It takes into the account the tone of voice, channels, accompanying imagery if needed, etc. It also typically ensures the message is signed off on by the proper bodies, whether that means the CEO, legal, or other team leaders.  

What should a crisis communications plan include?

Aside from the channels and team responsibilities, your crisis comms plan should include clear guidelines on how to handle media inquiries, internal communications, stakeholder communications, and social media responses.

Important components of a PR crisis strategy

An effective crisis strategy should encompass the following steps and tips:

Map out all of the possible scenarios that could create a crisis for your organization. Brainstorm with people from different departments, look at historical crises that have happened to competitors or comparable companies.

Of course it’s impossible to predict every possible crisis, the world is too unpredictable, but you can prepare for the most likely ones. 

Tip: Use AI to help you predict potential crises! Find several suggested AI prompts for crisis preparation in this guide.

Use a media monitoring and social listening tool, like Meltwater, to track mentions of your brand and organization names, the names of senior executives, and any other keywords that could be relevant to a potential problem. 

Check out this crisis monitoring guide for more information!

Most importantly, these tools allow you to use real-time alerts to ensure that whenever an unexpected spike in mentions of these search terms occurs, the crisis management team will immediately be informed. You don’t want to wait for a weekly report to realize a problem began five days ago.

When a crisis hits, it's important that everybody understands their roles and responsibilities. Most important of all, who will take charge of the situation to marshal the rest of the team, and who has the authority to give final approval to all communications? Be sure to include the legal department!

What does crisis communication entail and how can PR pros strategize effectively? ► Crisis comms examples ►Writing a crisis communications plan

Lance Concannon

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