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Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) Guide

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is transforming how brands show up in AI-powered search. Explore insights, strategies, and best practices to help your content rank and resonate across conversational engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot.

Explore insights and strategies for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) to help your brand stay visible and discoverable in AI-powered search.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) Blog Collection | Meltwater

Media monitoring helps organizations stay informed about what’s being said across online news, print, broadcast, podcasts, and other media channels. Whether you're tracking brand mentions, measuring PR performance, monitoring competitors, or identifying emerging trends, our expert guides, best practices, and industry insights will help you build a smarter media monitoring strategy and make more informed communications decisions.

Discover expert media monitoring guides, best practices, and industry insights to track brand mentions, monitor competitors, and stay ahead of the news.

Media Monitoring: Guides, Best Practices & Industry Insights

Every day billions of conversations take place on social media: tweets, posts, comments, blogs, reviews, podcasts, and much more.

Learn how to use social listening to make sense of all of that data.

On our social listening category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around social listening and social media monitoring. Read more.

Social Listening Blogs | Category

Business Reputation Management: What does it take to add reputation management to your marketing strategy? More importantly, how do you keep your reputation sparkly and shiny? Here’s your all-access guide to online reputation management for the long term.

On our reputation management category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around business reputation management. Read more.

Reputation Management Blogs | Category

From your brand's logo to your website, your social media presence to your customer support—these elements combined are what constitutes a brand in the minds of customers. But, there are thousands of other businesses that have a logo, website, social media presence, and website. So, how can you position your business on the market and make it stand out from the competition?

The key to success is branding & brand management!

On our brand management category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around brand management. Build your strategy and reach your goals!

Brand Management Blogs | Category

Competitive intelligence and the act of collecting competitive data can be seen as growth drivers for a company. Our guide will help you understand the concept of competitive intelligence (CI) by answering questions such as: What is the definition of competitive intelligence? How is competitive intelligence useful to organizations? What is the goal of competitive intelligence? And more.

On our competitive intelligence category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around competitive intelligence. Learn how to stay ahead.

Competitive Intelligence Blogs | Category

Let’s dive into the customer journey framework and how to optimize the process by creating a customer journey map and using metrics that matter when analyzing the customer journey.

On our customer journey category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around mapping and understanding the customer journey.

Customer Journey Blogs | Category

How do customers interact with my newly launched product?

How do I increase the productivity of my employees?

How do I know if my marketing efforts are working?

We have just two words for you...Data analytics!

On our data analytics category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around AI and data analytics. Technical and still easy to understand.

AI & Data Analytics Blogs | Category

Public relations and media relations can add impact to any marketing strategy. It’s an opportunity for brands to grow their reach beyond traditional sales messages. PR helps to shape the image you want people to have of your brand.

So, what is PR and how do you use it? This guide shows you everything you need to know to build a strong public relations foundation.

On our public relations (PR) category page, you find all our blogs covering public relations and communications topics. Step up your PR game.

Public Relations (PR) Blogs | Category

We all know exactly what the roles of sales or accounting are in a company, right? We might even have a slight idea of what the IT guys are doing.

But there is another business discipline, that plays a crucial role in organizations, even more so during the pandemic – internal communications!

But what exactly do we mean by that, what purpose does it serve and what steps can you take to ensure you and your employees will communicate effectively?

On our internal communications category page, you find all our blogs about internal comms topics. Learn about the intranet, internal newsletters, and more.

Internal Communications Blogs | Category

As the internet has taken root in more areas of our lives — everything from entertainment to shopping to paying bills and more — traditional marketing is becoming less impactful. As any marketer knows, you need to focus on where your audience is if you want to reach them. Since the average person spends about seven hours a day online, it’s no surprise that content has maintained its hold on marketers.

Here's a closer look at what content marketing is and why it matters more than ever in our digital-first economy.

On our content marketing category page, you find blogs about content marketing topics. Learn about strategies, KPIs, tips, and more. Make your content king!

Content Marketing Blogs | Category

The rise of the influencer marketing space – today a $10 billion industry, growing 50% per year – is one of the clearest examples of how social media is transforming traditional marketing. These days having a business website, presence on social, PR coverage, and your own content isn’t enough to compete.

We'll dive into the intricacies of influencer marketing to help ensure that you're equipped with the insights needed to be successful in this space.

On our influencer marketing category page, you find blogs about influencer marketing topics. Build your strategy, find influencers, and measure results.

Influencer Marketing Blogs | Category

Have you just launched a new product or service that you want to get the word out about? Maybe you want to share with consumers why it is awesome and how it is so much better than the one your competitors offer.

Well, then, there is one thing you can't do without...Marketing!

On our marketing category page, you find blogs about marketing topics. Learn about all the different angles and types of marketing and improve your results.

Marketing Blogs | Category

Building a following and using social media platforms to reach a wider audience requires a well-planned social media marketing strategy. In this guide, we’ll be looking at why social media marketing is so essential and how you can make it work for your business.

On our social media marketing category page, you find blogs about social media marketing topics. Learn how to get the highest paid social ROI!

Social Media Marketing Blogs | Category

In the fast-evolving realm of digital marketing and public relations, utilizing the right tools is crucial for success. Our interdisciplinary category showcases all the pertinent tools for digital marketing & PR. These tools help in enhancing your online presence and effectively reaching target groups, whether through reputation management, influencer marketing, or social media management.

On our digital marketing and PR tools category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around mapping and understanding the customer journey.

Digital Marketing & PR Tools Blogs | Category

AI adoption is no longer the challenge—trusted context is. Most organizations have AI tools, but many still rely on disconnected, stale, or unverified data, limiting the quality and trustworthiness of AI-generated outputs. Meltwater MCP brings trusted, real-time intelligence into AI assistants.

Your Best Context is Already in the Room

Today, PR teams aren’t just tracking media coverage and share of voice. They’re also measuring how their brand shows up in AI-generated answers, search summaries, and large language models (LLMs). This new LLM visibility layer is quickly becoming a critical part of PR performance.

15 Must-Have PR KPIs and How to Track Them

See how one platform can power every decision across PR, communications, and marketing.

The Meltwater Blog

Blog Topics: Generative Engine Optimization, Media Intelligence, Media Relations, Social Listening, Consumer Intelligence, Influencer Marketing

Find out how you can leverage Facebook to boost your brand's online presence and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

Facebook Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage Instagram to boost your brand's visual appeal and gain a competitive edge. Explore our category page today!

Instagram Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage LinkedIn to grow your professional network and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

LinkedIn Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage TikTok to elevate your brand with creative content and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

TikTok Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage X / Twitter to engage your audience effectively and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

X / Twitter Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage YouTube to create engaging video content and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

YouTube Blog | Meltwater

There are a lot of discussions today around making data-driven decisions; however, what happens when you’re basing your decisions on data that are inaccurate, irrelevant, or redundant? That's something that management teams aren't discussing enough. To get the most reliable insights, data cleansing and data enrichment should be prioritized just as much as data collection.

Organizations have no shortage of information about their customers. This has become both a blessing and a curse, as companies need to trust the data they have and know how to use it. Both are easier said than done. 

Collecting data isn’t the endgame for agencies or businesses. Rather, the next step is to focus on what that data can do to improve your company’s performance. Here’s why data cleansing and enrichment matter and how you can deploy both to improve your CRM.

How Are Data Cleansing and Enrichment Different?

Why Are Data Cleansing and Enrichment Important?

How Can Data Cleansing and Enrichment Enhance Your CRM?

Before we dive into the specifics, let’s start with some basic definitions. First, what is data cleansing?

Data cleansing is like the Marie Kondo method for your B2B data. Instead of letting bad data accumulate, you proactively clean up missing or inaccurate records, eliminate redundancies, and get rid of data that doesn’t matter. When you’re done, you’re left with organized customer records and can more easily find important information.

Data enrichment (also called data appending or data augmentation) is the vehicle used for data cleansing. These are often third-party data tools, software, or processes that refine and enhance your first-party data. When applied to CRM use cases, data enrichment tools may look for missing records and look to external sources to fill in the gaps. For example, if the address and phone number data fields of a company are blank, data enrichment tools can import them using external signals.

Both cleansing and enrichment seek to enhance your data so that you are able to better leverage it.

Data cleansing and data enrichment both fall under the data augmentation umbrella. The main difference is their end goals.

With data cleansing, you’re focusing on cleaning up the data you already have. For instance, if you have two entries for the same customer, you could combine those entries for a single customer file. Cleansing will remove duplicate or inaccurate records and leave accurate data alone.

With enrichment, your goal is to make your customer records as complete as possible. Knowing as much about your target audience as possible is key in making business-related decisions. The more you know about a customer, the better you can tailor your approach to cross-sell to them and create customer loyalty.

So, if you’re missing key information about customers in your CRM, such as contact information, enriched data helps to fill the gaps. From there, you can improve your marketing to current customers and prospects through hyper-targeted offers.

Data-driven marketing, lead generation, and the total customer experience all hinge on clean data. When raw data is incorrect, your marketing campaigns can’t do their best work.

The benefits of accurate customer data are seemingly infinite:

Improve profiling to send relevant offers to the right prospects

Verify you’re sending direct mail, etc. to the right person and address

Reduce wastage created by marketing to nonexistent emails, addresses, etc.

Enrich existing data with additional information to learn more about your customers

Gain more control over the entire B2B customer journey

With today’s data augmentation deep learning technology, you can cleanse and enrich your data with very little involvement on your part. That’s a huge plus as your CRM grows, as you don’t have to worry about manually updating records when customer data changes.

Because there's not much to do on your end, why wouldn't you make data management a top priority?

Tip: Think about your customer data management (CDM) to gain more actionable insights from your data.

If data enhancement is on your radar, we suggest starting with data cleansing. There’s no need to enrich data that are irrelevant or inaccurate.

Let’s break down the basics of data cleaning:

Step 1: Remove Duplicate and Irrelevant Entries

It’s not the size of your database that matters, but rather the quality of data inside. That’s why it’s useless to keep duplicate or irrelevant data that can muddy your insights.

Duplicate entries usually happen because of data collection processes. When you import or scrub data from third parties or combine datasets from multiple departments, you risk creating overlaps. The deduplication process consolidates records to minimize distractions and keep only important information.

Also during this step, you can discard any data that is irrelevant to your database. For instance, if you want to create a database to target just your New York-area customers, you wouldn’t want customers in Boston or Miami showing up.

When you’re done with Step 1, you should have a neat and tidy database showing only relevant entries.

When combining data sets, fields don’t always perfectly transfer. Different data sets may have unique naming conventions or styles that look different than the data they’re being combined with. As a result, you might end up with some fields in all caps or have items with misspellings or misplacements.

Fixing any structural errors makes your dirty data look cleaner. All information becomes consistent and follows a standard format. This reduces the chance that some pieces of data may fall under the wrong category or otherwise not be properly used.

Step 3: Standardize Your Data Cleaning Process

Cleaning your data should be an ongoing process, not a one-and-done activity. Errors can occur at any time, so routine data cleaning can ensure the most accurate and up-to-date data set.

However, you can also reduce the numbers of errors you find by standardizing your data processes. Set rules about how users should input data, as well as the type of data that needs to be collected. It helps increase accuracy and your confidence in your data.

Cleaning your company data gives you a strong foundation. Now it’s time to build it out with enrichment. Here’s how to turn incomplete records into quality data:

Data enhancement has three parts: what you know, what you don’t know, and what you need to know. After cleansing, you should have a better idea of what data you have. From there, you can decide what else you really need to complete an ideal customer profile.

The key here is to be selective. That can be tricky because selective isn’t always complete. You might have tons of fields that you could fill in. But it’s best to focus on just the most relevant information. Too much data causes distractions and makes it hard to focus on what matters.

Segmentation can be a helpful exercise when evaluating your data. Depending on the purpose of your dataset, you can decide what else you need to know that you don't already have.

So, you found that you’re missing some phone numbers for some of your customers. Do you email each one to ask for their digits? Of course not!

A data enhancement tool can do a lot of the heavy lifting for you. Tools can import data from trusted third parties in real-time. They fill in the missing fields you care about without you having to type it in manually.

Data doesn’t necessarily have an expiration date, but it does age quickly. That’s why data enrichment (and cleansing) should be treated as ongoing processes.

People move. They change jobs. They get new email addresses. They may even switch to a completely different line of work! Staying on top of these changes as they happen allows you to stay connected and continue creating opportunities with those connections.

Even with standardization, to master data management should be an active priority, not a one-and-done activity. Errors can occur at any time, so routine validation can ensure the most accurate and up-to-date data set. 

Data makes up a big part of the solution to better marketing. You need reliable and complete customer data you can trust because every touchpoint depends on it. Your mailing lists ensure your direct mail makes it to the right person and place. Your sales team can call the right phone number the first time.

Last but not least, you can more easily get inside the mind of the consumer and drive your marketing campaigns forward.

Data augmentation deep learning tools are making data cleaning and enrichment easier, faster, and more feasible for marketing experts. By using machine learning and automation, enriching and cleaning data becomes a continuous cycle you don’t have to think twice about.

Better data quality improves everything from data analytics to the customer experience. Plus, when you use machine learning tools, you can avoid outsourcing to data enhancement services and keep all of your data in-house.

How to Use Data Cleansing & Data Enrichment to Improve Your CRM

Since their emergence just three months ago in February 2021, NFTs - “non-fungible tokens”, or blockchain-based certificates of ownership for virtual or physical assets - have taken off in a way we haven’t seen since - well, the previous crypto boom in 2017. 

Non-fungible token, NFT - Explore - Google Trends

On 10 March, a digital artist named Beeple sold an NFT for $69 million, making him the third most valuable living artist, behind only Jeff Koons and David Hockney. The work, ‘Everydays: The First 5,000 Days’ is a collection of crude, satirical gross-out cartoons and sci-fi style illustrations from an artist who had not sold a work for over $100 until late last year. It was bought by Singapore NFT production studio and crypto fund Metapurse, with elevated claims that “This is going to be a billion-dollar piece someday. This has the potential to be the work of art of this generation”. (The artist himself often refers to his illustrations as ‘crap’.) 

The response was mixed - and highly polarised. VCs and digital marketers praised NFTs as part of a shift to a “creator economy” of influencers, substacks, and self-productification. Tech-skeptics point out that NFT sales do not exchange ownership of the asset itself, only a link towards it - and are thus ripe for fraud and bitrot. People asked if the exorbitant ecological footprint of blockchain-based technologies was really what we want to be the future of creative production? Was it about art at all: or was it just an asset bubble: thousands of crypto-rich with unfathomable digital wealth seeking something - anything - to spend it on? NFTs weren’t the only strange asset bubble during the corona crisis, as - bored, stuck at home, and extremely online - a generation pumped penny stocks and frantically traded Pokemon cards. 

Anil Dash, who created one of the earliest non-fungible tokens, wrote that NFTs Weren't Supposed To End Like This - but of course they were long out of his control. 

"So who's winning the battle to define what NFTs mean?"

I got talking to the Audiense team about this question. So many competing narratives circulating - but what did this look like quantitatively? What communities were involved? 

We used Meltwater to collect English-language Twitter conversation for two time periods: 

Early adopters: 1 January 2021 - 28 February 2021 

Early mainstream: 1 March 2021 - 1 April 2021 

Then used the Audiense tool to visualise the communities present using social network analysis - and dig into their characteristics. Here’s what we found. 

The first creatives involved are visual artists (23% of the total). It’s a distinctively digital cohort: one community of self-defined “crypto artists”, a little older (age 25-34) who have been involved in crypto for some time - plus cohorts of videogame artists, graphic designers, and people working professionally in a design & illustration. 

The creatives aren’t a ‘contemporary fine art’ audience - with degrees from the RCA gallery representation and coverage in Frieze and Artforum and so on. Instead, their work has a distinctively digital aesthetic informed by videogames and sci-fi movies: neon-lit environments, smooth gradients, and pneumatic curves. 

The investor class is in the discussion from the start (17% of the audience) with two crypto developer & entrepreneur segments (one more bitcoin-focused than the other). The capital for the bubble to inflate is there early on. 

There’s also a substantial proportion of freebie hunters (27% of the audience), looking for “airdrops” (crypto giveaways). These audiences use #NFT hashtags but do not appear actively involved in making or discussing NFTs: instead, it’s a developing world audience (Nigeria, Indonesia, Philippines) looking to benefit from a wealth bubble. 

Overall the audience is very young (47% or nearly half age under 25) and very male (77%) 

By late March, the audience has significantly changed. 

There were 110,489 members in this online audience that we examined, and new communities had arrived: 

Musicians & Music Fans start talking about NFTs, following the entrance of some big names into this space in March (Calvin Harris releasing an NFT collection; Kings Of Leon generating $2M in NFT sales for their new album) 

Sports Fans also join the discussion. Sports collectibles have been another coronavirus boom sector, as trading cards sold for records of $5.2 million and $4.6 million - and NFT video highlight clips generated more than $150 million in sales in February alone. 

Contemporary Fine Art is now visible as a community - as a more ‘traditional’ art audience who follow institutions such as MoMA, the Tate, the Guggenheim, and art media such as Artnet, Creative Review, and artforum, join the NFT discussion. On 28 March, GQ publishes a feature on how “NFTs are here to stay and the art world is having to catch up fast” 

The international giveaway seekers have now exited the NFT conversation, perhaps not having found it as an efficient source of income. The Nigerian tech community present in this audience is a professional one, made up of people working in software, entrepreneurial & marketing jobs similar to the US-focused “Tech Biz & Marketing” segment. 

What really strikes me about the NFT conversation is how substantially it’s being driven by “indie creatives”. The illustrators and fan artists, the self-published writers, the animators and games artists. Their presence in the NFT conversation indicates that this possibility of finally being able to make real money from their creative work excites them. But is it really happening for them? 

As Kimberley Parker pointed out on Medium on 19 April, it’s crucial not to get distracted by the big Beeple numbers: “Most artists are not making money off NFTs.” Noting the lack of robust transaction data from the main NFT marketplaces, she scraped data from OpenSea, the biggest NFT marketplace, to find out what was really going on. “Most NFT sites will recommend you set your sale price at 0.5 ETH,” she reports, “which was about $894 USD on March 19th. The number of Primary Sales that ended up selling for the recommended price was a whopping 1.8%.” 

Instead, a third of NFTs sell for $100 or less, and 76% sell for under $500. With transaction fees easily coming in at the hundred dollar mark, the margin of profit is tiny. Her analysis also reveals that the prospect of making art “collectible” is also over-sold: a substantial majority of transactions are first purchases. 

For Parker, this is political: “These numbers do not show the democratization of wealth thanks to a technological revolution. They show an acutely minuscule number of artists making a vast amount of wealth off a small number of sales while the majority of artists are being sold a dream of immense profit that is horrifically exaggerated. Hiding this information is manipulative, predatory, and harmful, and these NFT sites have a responsibility to surface all this information transparently. Not a single one has.” 

In a gold rush, the vast majority of miners never strike it rich. The money’s in selling them shovels. 

But it depends of course what “success” means for these illustration and fanart communities. If lured in by the hope of achieving Beeple-like riches, they’re almost certainly be disappointed. But that may not be the case. Fanart communities have long operated as active and closely-knit groups on Twitter - facilitated in part by the platform’s more tolerant approach to NSFW content! They already had a micro-economy based around commissions and tipping: artists would draw you a custom user icon, or an illustration of your favourite TV or anime character. Price-points are typically at an affordable, <$200 level. 

Has this activity just moved online? Is the volume in the NFT space coming not from transformative contemporary art, but sexy pictures of anime girls and humanised animals? Our audience analysis suggests this is likely. 

The influx of new crypto money into digital art, then, may not transform the art world in quite the ways that people are expecting. Obviously, it is undeniably impacting the fine art world - particularly galleries like Christie's, who are needing to adapt quickly to sell this new asset class. (Investment and speculation have long been driving forces in the fine art market, of course). But it also seems likely that a lot of volume is occurring in a parallel but quite separate digital art market: one of the individual creators making character-driven digital illustrations and fan-art adjacent work. As on Substack, very few creators may be making a living from it, and only a tiny handful getting rich. But thousands are likely making a few hundred dollars a month. Is this a monetised side-hustle or can it grow into a full ‘Creator Economy’ with a digital middle class? That’s the open question.

Jay Owens is a research director and strategist who works particularly on audience insight, trends and innovation. She works as a freelance consultant helping brands and audiences navigate the volatile media landscape, and leverage emerging consumer needs, behaviours and passions.

Audience Report: Who's Driving the Chatter Online Around NFTs?

Social media bots. Are they a force for good? A manifestation of social media’s capacity to inflict enormous harm? Or simply a clever piece of technology that will do either, depending on the person behind the bot?

As usual, the answer lies somewhere in the middle and hinges on your perspective. For example, despite a general absence of solid evidence, many people credit social media bots with influencing recent election results in the US, UK, Germany, and France.

Short for ‘robot’ and sometimes also referred to as an ‘automaton’, they are also said to be a force behind the numerous international conspiracy theories circulating around the COVID-19 pandemic and its vaccines, for example.

So what is this seemingly all-powerful technology capable of massive global influence and manipulation of public opinion? 

A more in-depth overview of the technology

The insidious influence of chatbots on social media platforms

The US Government’s Office of Cyber and Infrastructure Analysis gives its definition of social media bots as: “Programs that vary in size depending on their function, capability, and design; and can be used on social media platforms to do various useful and malicious tasks while simulating human behaviour. These programs use artificial intelligence, big data analytics, and other programs or databases to imitate legitimate users posting content.”

Tip: Learn why 2023 was the year of AI chatbots

Imperva, a leading cybersecurity company, gives a more succinct and balanced definition: “An internet bot is a software application that runs automated tasks over the internet. Tasks run by automated technology are typically simple and performed at a much higher rate compared to human Internet activity.”

Darius Kazemi, a computer programmer and self-proclaimed ‘internet artist’ who studies the nature and behaviour of these robots, distils the bot definition even further: “A computer that attempts to talk to [people] through technology that was designed for humans to talk to humans.” The mighty New York Times has its own characterisation: “Those little automatic programs that talk to us in the digital dimension as if they were human.”

Now that we have a basic definition of social bots, let’s take a more in-depth overview of these little programs found on the internet, on social media platforms, in the app environment, and in online gaming.

Certainly, there are malicious bots used with malevolent intent. But many are simply used for an array of clever, but largely unspectacular, day-to-day jobs that require automation tools in order to maximise efficiency and all-hours availability.

Chatbots are the first step to simple 24/7 customer service, guiding clients on social media channels and apps such as Facebook Messenger through a basic sales, Q+A, or product-ordering process.

Information automatons that alert followers to breaking news on topics you’re interested in.

A Word automaton that makes learning new words easier for would-be students wanting to pass entry exams to prestigious universities.

A survey version that allows you to send customer surveys from your account after the completion of a function such as a product purchase or a query.

A Twitch bot that lets followers process song requests on the live-streaming platform for gamers and other lifestyle casters.

Creating fake followers and comments on Instagram

Broadcasting fake news and conspiracy theories via Twitter

Registering false live-game views or imitating genuine streamer/viewer interaction on gaming sites

Professor Kathleen Carley of Carnegie Mellon University in the US emphasises that technology is neutral and people determine how it’s used. “[They] are just software. They are used for good things and they are used for bad things,” she says.

Did tweets created by fake accounts help determine the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election? There were certainly, for example, instances where automatons were hijacking Covid-19 hashtags with disinformation and conspiracy hashtags, such as #greatawakening and #qanon. Similarly, an article in Digital Trends reported the spreading of BLM conspiracy theories and disinformation around the protests and the Black Lives Matter hashtag.

Michael Kreil, a data journalist from Germany agrees with Kazemi when he says there’s no proof of tweets, dubious accounts, or any similar activity determining the course of an election.

Indeed, some experts argue that the threat of excessive influence by such technology is vastly exaggerated. For example, a high volume of tweets generated on Twitter about a particular topic is often merely one set of spambots tweeting and retweeting specific hashtags to followers which are actually other spambots. If legitimate followers aren’t reading the tweets and hijacked hashtags, the influence on public opinion of those tweets and their dubious content is negligible.

For marketers, a benefit of social media bots is that they can use them to engage with the customer and complete an end-to-end interaction – from enquiry to sale and payment – in one place and through one account. This applies to popular messaging apps such as:

There’s no need to fill out a contact form on a website and then wait for an employee to respond at some point in the future, or find a phone number on a website and then go offline to make the call, only to be told the person you need to speak to has gone for lunch. Instead, everything happens in one place and at one time, day or night, unless the customer specifically requests an interaction with a representative of the organisation.

By using ever-advancing artificial intelligence and voice-recognition technology, chatbots can deliver a surprisingly seamless customer experience – within parameters of course. Functions that companies may wish to entrust to their talkbots could include:

Welcoming visitors to a social media site

Booking an appointment for an in-store service such as a haircut or facial

Providing basic information such as times when products may be booked in for service and repairs

Answering common questions such as the pricing of popular products

Guiding customers through a simple product-purchase process

Conducting a basic Q+A to resolve common problems

Tip: Learn how to use chatbots to improve your sales

But chatterbots aren’t people. So the science behind them is to anticipate what your customers are likely to want and the ways they will probably interact – and equip the AI-powered technology to respond accordingly.

Some of the things that chatterbots struggle to do include:

Handling complex Q+A interactions that are best left to a trained employee

Dealing with angry customers (AI-generated platitudes only exacerbate the problem)

When using chatbots, don’t turn the interaction into an excuse to send clients spammy messages thereafter. Marketers have pretty much ruined the call centre, SMS, and email as a meaningful way to interact with customers because of incessant spam. It's important to build a non-spammy automaton and avoid disgruntled clients reaching for the spam filter.

Each messaging app has its own T&Cs governing the behaviour of this technology. For example, on Messenger, a brand can send a message only if the customer prompted the conversation. You can use a Facebook Messenger bot to reply to the message, however, if he or she doesn't find value and opt-in to receive future notifications within the first 24 hours, no additional communication is allowed.

We’ve seen how chatbot marketing can be a marketer’s friend. Now let’s examine how Facebook bots and other social bots can be a marketing nightmare through their insidious influence on social media platforms such as Instagram, where Instagram bots have posed a significant challenge.

The continued rise of influencer marketing has seen this practice dominate marketing budgets. Why? Because it's an effective way of building a customer base for businesses by aligning a brand with an online persona who then promotes the product or service to their legion of followers and fans.

AI & Data Analytics

How to Use Data Cleansing & Data Enrichment to Improve Your CRM

Audience Report: Who's Driving the Chatter Online Around NFTs?

Social Media Bots: How They Work and How to Use Them

Market Intelligence: Using Real-Time Data and Generate More Leads and Revenue

The Value of API and Analysing Different Data Types

Elections And The Threat of Foreign Interference

The Battle for the White House on Social Media

A Data-Driven Analysis: The Future of eSports in the Middle East

How to Use Meltwater As a Research Tool

Artificial Intelligence in PR: Where We Are and Where We're Headed

How a Sentiment Analysis API can Transform Business Decision Making

How Data Can Inform Your Marketing Campaigns: The Lion King Case Study

AI & Data Analytics

How to Use Data Cleansing & Data Enrichment to Improve Your CRM

Audience Report: Who's Driving the Chatter Online Around NFTs?

Social Media Bots: How They Work and How to Use Them

Market Intelligence: Using Real-Time Data and Generate More Leads and Revenue

The Value of API and Analysing Different Data Types

Elections And The Threat of Foreign Interference

The Battle for the White House on Social Media

A Data-Driven Analysis: The Future of eSports in the Middle East

How to Use Meltwater As a Research Tool

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