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Generative AI is everywhere now. You see it in content, campaigns, customer experiences, and even internal workflows. It promises speed, scale, and efficiency, but there’s a harder question sitting underneath all that progress; Do your audiences actually trust it?

Trust in the Age of AI: What Consumers Really Think About AI Generated Content

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

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

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

What Is Data Analytics? [Beginner’s Guide 2023]
How can I grow my business? 
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

In this guide, we want to give you a peek into the definition of social media management, the daily schedule of a social media manager, social media platforms to promote your business, and the do’s & don’ts of social media management.
Are you ready to begin the journey of becoming a social media superstar?

On our social media management category page, you find blogs about social media management topics. Build and manage your online community.

Social Media Management 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

The average social media marketer typically starts their day by scanning their social listening platform of choice, sharing a few interesting articles, thanking new followers, responding to @mentions, wondering where the past two hours went, and then starting the cycle all over again in a few hours. 

They also mix in whatever requests land in their email inboxes from the PR and marketing teams. Unfortunately, this recurring set of activities isn’t a sustainable or efficient social media workflow. Having a casual approach to social media activities can make it nearly impossible to go on vacation. For these reasons and more, it’s important to create—and stick to—a social media content calendar.

Preparing and following a set editorial plan has many benefits, including:

Enhancing your planning and time-management

There's more, so keep reading this post to get your social media marketing workflow right with an editorial calendar. 

Once you start documenting social media content, you’ll notice posting patterns that lean towards sharing certain content types significantly more often than others. Although it’s unlikely that you’ll end up with a perfect balance of audio, visual, and written content, a content calendar makes sure you won’t accidentally leave out key content types that appeal to highly engaged customers or outspoken influencers.

Your editorial line will definitely contain recurring elements. For example, you might share a new blog post each Wednesday and an inspiring image each Friday. Create placeholders in your social media content calendar for these recurring activities so that you can effectively plan around them.

If you know you have a new blog post every Wednesday, you can plan a lot of content around it each week. Here’s an example of what we mean:

Plan recurring shares, switching up the text that accompanies the blog link


While you don’t want to use the same tone and copy across all social channels, keeping with consistent messaging in your content strategy and adopting a distinct voice will keep you on-brand, regardless of channel.

Viewing copy for each channel, side-by-side, will prevent you from sounding like two or three different company personalities. And will help avert misfires, such as sharing three conflicting sets of information for the same event.

Ask yourself  What’s my goal with this post? Do you want to generate traffic, engagement or share important information with your followers?

Make sure that you note the specific purpose of your post directly on your social media content calendar. This will help you to understand which metrics you should be using to measure whether or not you’ve successfully met your objective.

Don’t forget to add a note detailing what type of content the post is. Having this visible ensures you plan for a good balance. For example, only pushing promotional content will soon make you feel like you’re shouting into a black hole! Try to alternate between posts about your products, sneak peeks behind the scenes, industry news, posts from third parties etc. As rule of thumb, aim for 20% of the content you share to focus on your company and 80% from third parties. When the content is promoting your brand, use engaging CTA’s so that your followers don’t get bored.

Following that same logic as the point mentioned above, both you and your audience will soon get bored if you constantly post about the same subject. Include the subject in your social media content calendar for an easy overview of your key topics. This will act as a reminder to keep things fresh and interesting for your audience! To help you choose subjects, take a look at Google Keyword Planner to understand what your audience is googling, then engage around the topics via social, preferably answering their questions.

You can also use a media intelligence tool like Meltwater to uncover trending themes in your industry that you can then jump on and become a thought leader by doing so.

Understand which topics are dominating the conversations online. Use the trending themes as inspiration when creating your content calendar.

Make sure the subject of your post is clear to your followers, particularly when it comes to the title and caption. Not all headlines are created equal. “10 easy tricks for irresistible headlines” is already more exciting to the reader than “How to write a headline.” Keep this in mind when titling your content and drafting your tweets and captions. Don’t get too “click baity” however. The content you link to must reflect the caption you’ve used or people will bounce off the page very quickly and you’ll lose the trust of your audience too.

Elements of a Useful Social Media Editorial Calendar

There are calendar, workflow and strategy tools available for managing social media editorial calendars, including CoSchedule, Kapost, and Divvy HQ. However, you can get started without a financial investment by using a spreadsheet - Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets (example above). The tool you use is less important than its ability to assist you in documenting social media activities in an easy-to-navigate manner.

So what to include in a social media content calendar? We have found including the following fields to be immensely helpful:

For organisational purposes, this may seem a bit too obvious, but the days of the week can also directly inspire your social media content calendar. Certain days of the week even inspired their own hashtags on social media. Think about #TBT (Throwback Thursday), #WCW (Woman Crush Wednesday) and, of course, #TGIF!

When planning your content, organise it chronologically by date and time of publication. This may seem intuitive, but many professionals forget to do this and lose sight of their weekly, monthly and daily routines. Planning your social media content calendar chronologically ensures you see the frequency of your posts at a glance and identify the times that work best for your audience.

Use tools like monday.com, Meltwater Engage, an excel worksheet or even Google Calendar to plan content together with your team. This way you make sure your plan is clear for yourself and everyone else who needs to be in the loop.

Each social media channel has its own characteristics. Some users favour one platform over another because of this. Twitter people engage little and often with the content leaning more towards real-time updates. When we compare this to Facebook, the content tends to be more evergreen. Because of this, you need to adapt the copy of your posts to the different platforms. For example, a food brand would use Facebook to post a recipe, but Twitter to make a PR crisis comms announcement. 

Manually copying and pasting the hashtags for all of your posts can be a tedious task and you run the risk of getting lazy and using the same (less relevant) hashtags for all your posts. Creating a space in your content calendar to save the hashtags you’d like to use for important subjects ensures a consistent/ varied use of hashtags and of course, saves you time!

To create your editorial calendar, you can start with a simple spreadsheet. However, using a community management tool such as Meltwater’s engagement platform will allow you to create a more visible, practical and actionable calendar through which you can plan and publish your posts.

If you’re ready to get started with your own social media content calendar and need a tool that you and your team can use to start implementing the tips above, get in touch with us using the form below for a free demo of our Social Media Management Platform. Plan, edit and publish your posts in a collaborative environment, and maintain an overview of your upcoming content. 

Why Your Social Media Needs an Editorial Calendar

In today’s digital age, a growing number of businesses are beginning to include social media in their marketing mix. Instagram has gained considerable popularity in South Africa since its official launch in 2012, and now has 2,68 million local users.  With a 133% increase in users within South Africa over the course of the last year alone, more and more local businesses are turning to Instagram as a platform for driving brand awareness, and ultimately, sales. Instagram is also increasingly being recognised as a platform able to transcend geographic boundaries and generate business among new markets. Today we’ll be taking a look at the possibilities of Instagram for business, as well as how marketers can go about monitoring their social media success with a social media monitoring tool.

Tip: Are you looking for the right influencers to partner with? Check out the top South African Instagram Influencers and the best South African fashion influencers.

Despite its rapid growth and promising business prospects, it shouldn’t be forgotten that Instagram is still a form of social media. This means that users access it to be social, and can become quickly impatient with obvious brand advertisements and online sales pitches.

Introducing: The Golden 20/80 Rule. To maintain an attractive business profile, ensure that just 20% of your Instagram content is directly about your brand, product or service. The remaining 80% of your posts should seek to promote a lifestyle – or in other words, content that audiences are interested in and want to share. The key here is listening to what your audience is talking about and then tapping into that interest by using a social listening tool like Meltwater.

Tip: By listening to social conversations you also find more detailed South African social media statistics.

For instance, one of South Africa’s most successful Instagram accounts, Mr. Price, simply shares a picture of the trendy, recently revamped Grand Cafe and Beach in Cape Town with the caption “About today… Double tap and tell us how you are spending this Saturday.” This post has nothing to do with Mr. Price clothing, but instead utilises a perfect picture for audiences to screenshot, filter and regram, while also encouraging engagement. The use of trending hashtags such as “#currentmood” and “#summerfeels” further promote the fashionable, fun-loving and youthful lifestyle of Mr. Price.

Tip: Check out the most trending hashtags in Australia and the most trending hashtags in South Africa.

In a similar way, the retailer Woolworths will also post content on Instagram that they know will resonate with their customers’ epicurean desires. One such example made use of a decadent bread and cheese board, captioned, “Sweet dreams are made of cheese, #findthemagic”. By understanding the gourmet interests of its customer base, the brand is able to maximise engagement and ultimately drive up their own online visibility.

Once you’ve nailed the lifestyle content balance, creative captions and relevant hashtags, it’s time to step your game up. Keeping up-to-date with Instagram’s innovations (of which there are many) helps to maintain the interest of current followers, gain new ones, and stay ahead of competitors.

2016 saw Instagram introduce the Instagram Story, allowing audiences to post short videos or pictures with a 24-hour lifespan in a feed running alongside users’ existing galleries. Since its launch in August, Instagram has added valuable updates such as the ability to stream live video and send disappearing messages. The latter being in direct competition with Snapchat, the popular social media app which has subsequently experienced a decrease in popularity. Instagram is poised to become the social media platform of choice for businesses targeting younger demographics – as is demonstrated in the contrast between Nike’s most-viewed Snapchat story at 66 000 views, and their first Instagram Story which received 800 000 views.

Owing to the temporary nature of each Story, brands are able to exercise more of their creative flare when it comes to publishing inventive and engaging content. Dear Rae, the South African jewellery designer, recently posted a Story of an adventure through Babylonstoren, drawing comparisons between the country’s natural beauty and that of the designer’s locally produced goods. While Red Bull South Africa’s approach has been to include a variety of extreme sporting events, local talent and athletes; sometimes simultaneously promoting the actual energy drink and new flavours.

Audiences appreciate authenticity and spontaneity, so taking a spur-of-the-moment Instagram Story can often work in your favour.

A business should aim to share one to two relevant and high-quality images on Instagram per day (and at peak-time) to ensure it will be noticed. Don’t overload your audience, as this will lessen your chances of maintaining quality and originality, and it may even be overlooked as spam. We recommend sharing relevant content on Instagram Stories throughout the day to take full advantage of the feature – such as behind-the-scenes footage, “sneak peaks” at upcoming products, and the inclusion of colleagues and work environments. This gives audiences the opportunity to have a deeper, more personalised connection with your brand.

Most importantly, the success of Instagram for business needs to be monitored. Meltwater’s online media monitoring software monitors over 350 million social sources, including Instagram.

Harnessing media intelligence can help determine which posts or Stories generated the most active audience engagement and whether it was positive or negative feedback – giving marketers the insights necessary to inform and refine their social media strategy.

In conclusion, using Instagram for business is about branding yourself according to your customer interests, promoting a lifestyle in line with said interests, and creating a #vibe.

How to Leverage Instagram for your Business in South Africa

Everyone needs something to strive for to keep them on track. Getting clear on important KPIs to support your business goals is essential in moving towards data-driven content marketing. After reading this post, download our ebook to get an overview of measurable metrics with actionable tips.

57% —that’s how far the average B2B buyer is through the purchase decision cycle before engaging a team member in sales. With nearly 60% of your customers engaging first with your content, then with your team, there’s still only 88% of B2B marketers that consider themselves to use content marketing as part of their business strategy.

As a result, content marketing efforts aren’t a strategic business function, which means less budget and resources are given to marketing teams to engage prospective buyers. This lack of resources means that most content efforts end up being experimental with a “just get it done” mentality, leaving thousands of dollars of untapped potential on the table.

Here are four key ways to make your content efforts data-driven:

Showcase the potential of content on your business’s bottom line by identifying the right metrics to measure content initiatives against.

If you know where you’re headed, you’ll know what to track to stay focused.

To be a data-driven content team, look beyond just measuring how much content you’re creating and answer why you’re creating content in the first place. Data-driven content teams think how content makes a difference long-term and beyond just the project to how that content impacts other functions of the business.

A new webinar, for example, will get the business 100 new leads in the short-term, boost brand awareness, and increase web traffic. Long-term, the same webinar contributed to the bottom-line of closing $100,000 new sales in the quarter. Each webinar created, marketed, and executed captures more leads, builds brand trust, which all feed a marketing funnel.

All these efforts work in various ways to help with conversion to revenue. So how do you get started proving that connection and showing ROI? Think backward.

Working backward from strategic business goals ensures you’re not creating content for the sake of it, but you’re focused on the right content to deliver on the bottom line every time. Ask yourself what each campaign created is hoping to get you.

If your goal is to land $100,000 in new sales, think to the prerequisites needed to make a sale:

Figure out which exact metric you need to increase. Do you have enough leads to convert to opportunities, or do you need to focus on lead generation? Based on previous quarters' conversion rates, you may need to focus on lead generation, or perhaps you have buckets of leads and need to focus on conversion nurturing).

Identify a benchmark you’re working at to improve. Look to last quarter’s conversion numbers to predict what specific areas you can focus on increasing.

Create a strategic plan that highlights what content activities will improve each metric. Some content activities such as webinars, newsletter signup optimizations, events, or content downloads will work to capture leads, while email marketing will nurture and aim to convert leads to opportunities.

In the list above, it’s clear what content activities are tied to increasing revenue of the bottom line. While the direct impact of blog X compared to blog Y might be difficult to prove, a documented strategic plan clearly highlights what metrics matter, what content is contributing to metrics and provides a quantifiable foundation for benchmarking.

Being a data-driven comes to always ensure the following two questions get answered:

What metrics does our business deem important?

What content mediums are most likely to help us deliver on that metric?

If you’re unsure, always default to asking, does the metric you’re using to identify success help you make decisions? Do you know what you need to do to execute and make it happen? If you don’t, you’re probably not linking content output to the right metric.

Lean on the goldmine of data that is already right in front of you: Analyze what content lead to conversions in the past to map out future content campaigns.

One of the benefits of data-driven content marketing is that there’s always opportunities to iterate and optimize on what’s currently being done. If the business goal is to generate $100,000 in new revenue, and you know that to hit the marketing to sales conversion % you’re going to need 1,000 more new leads, look at past campaigns that have delivered the most leads.

Look at what worked within that campaign and see if there’s potential re-purposing opportunity. Analyze where along the campaign mishaps happened, such as spikes in unsubscribes, and take note of how your new campaign will course correct for those mistakes.

Being data-driven means you’re continuously analyzing past metrics to iterate on your strategy in future decisions.

A/B test to continuously create comparative data.

A/B testing is one strategy to ensure that you’re always aiming at optimizing the impact of content on your business. Whether the focus is on capturing new leads or, converting an existing database of leads into new opportunities, A/B testing can be used to make small improvements that drive low-cost data-inspired ROI.

There are ways to refine your content. Opportunities include tweaking landing pages, to writing new call-to-actions, refining email nurture messages, and buying ads to drive leads to sales conversions. Additionally, you can implement A/B testing to identify what’s working and what’s not and take the time to audit content to uncover insights into how you can improve.

Don’t become complacent or okay with average.

A/B testing ensures you’re continuously working on driving, even more, ROI time and time again. Even if your current conversion rates are making an impact on your bottom line, becoming complacent with benchmarks can mean that your business is losing out on thousands of dollars of untapped opportunities.

Experiment with timing you send emails with critical CTAs and ensure you have a control version.

A survey of over 6 million emails done by Hubspot revealed 80% fewer emails are sent over the weekend. As a result, they’re 10% more likely to be opened.* Always A/B test to optimize the potential of your messages, but be sure to use a control version to test improvements. A “control” version is the original email you did or would have sent before coming up with a second version. Having the original to benchmark changes against ensures you have one copy that you’re always checking against.

Having a version to check against also ensures that slight changes you’re making aren’t confounding variables. Things occurring that are out of your control (i.e. email server blocks, away messages, etc.) Also, without a baseline to measure against, it becomes difficult to see the actual ROI of any small tweak versus other changes.

Conversion rates are only meaningful if they’re accomplishing the right goal for your business.

Benchmarks, best practices, and goals to track ROI are only meaningful if they’re the right metrics and ROI that your business finds valuable. The best piece of advice is that you have to do what’s in your business’s better interest.

Don’t just do what’s new and innovative because it’s a hot trend.

What’s the business goal, how can content contribute in moving that forward, and how will do you know your content is contributing to that goal?

A good way to manage ideation and pulse check if the content initiatives you’re executing on is continuously making a difference is to have bi-weekly status meetings as a team. Keep it simple by using the start, stop, keep method. Define what you should keep doing, what you should stop doing, and what you need to start doing.

Remember, being data-driven means that you’re taking specific business goals and identifying opportunities where content can make a positive impact against the bottom-line.

Looking for more information on how to improve the impact of your content and become a data-driven marketing team? Download our ebook, The Keys to the Kingdom: Making Your Marketing Team More Data-Centric.

This article originally appeared in Marketing.AI, was written by Kendra Moroz from Business2Community and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.

What Does It Mean to Be a “Data-Driven” Content Team?

Smart social media campaigns can drive, enhance, and/or support PR and marketing activities. Even smarter social media campaigns embrace integration. When a campaign is so successful that it makes a difference for its cause, seeing it from the outside can be envy-inducing. But we can learn from successful PR and marketing campaigns by taking stock of what they do right—and emulating—without duplicating their process.

Charity-focused social campaigns are among the hardest to connect with (perhaps due to lack of budget or ideas). There needs to be a spark to spur action. So, we gathered a few examples of how successful social media campaigns empower health-related causes.

When an organization’s goal is to reduce 25% of international cardiovascular heart disease cases (CVD) and strokes by 2025, you know the gloves are coming off. Geneva-based World Heart Foundation has been celebrating World Heart Day every September 29th for the past 16 years. They advocate for funding and prevention of heart disease and strokes by globally broadcasting their dangers; since those diseases kill the most people worldwide.

Their global scale means that increasingly—social channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Instagram—play a big part in their campaigns. Instagram and Twitter especially, were utilized this year to encourage people around the world to take ‘Healthy Heart Selfies’ (exercise and health related selfies) and post them with the #PowerYourLife and #WorldHeartDay branded hashtags. These, in turn, were curated by the World Heart Foundation, shared on its website, and branded social channels.

Queen Latifah and her mother, working with the American Heart Association, joined the cause by sharing their experiences on Youtube and encouraging others to do the same. It’s difficult to find influencers willing to offer their personal experiences; so when a celebrity opens up conversations about their family health details on social media, with the goal of informing and inspiring others in support of your cause, it’s a coup. Latifah’s generous contribution to World Heart Day was exactly the endorsement every campaign needs.  

Rise Above Heart Failure

From across the pond in England, UK comes the quit smoking campaign by the NHS, funded by Public Health England (PHE). It kicked off this past week (October—get it!?) and runs through the month. Using a Facebook Messenger bot as a smoking cessation cheerleader, the bot sends encouraging private messages to those attempting to quit. Though the bot is an important aspect of the campaign, #Stoptober is supported by other social channels, including Twitter @stoptober, Instagram #Stoptober, and their informative official site.

The Movember Foundation has set itself quite the bar. From its humble 1999 beginnings in Adelaide, South Australia—when 80 men raised money for the RSPCA by growing mustaches—the popularity of the campaign has spread to the European, African, South, and North American continents. With that, the focus has changed from supporting our furry companions to global men’s health and has since raised $710-million worldwide. In 2012, Movember hit an impressive benchmark when more than one million men signed up to grow a November mustache for charity.

Starting as a distributed and grassroots’ effort, how was Movember able to mobilize to this level of success? 

Beyond the low barrier to entry, Movember fundraising sites have always been geo-specific, allowing participants to build local rapport. But both the local and international community are easily found on Twitter or Instagram using #movember or by following @movember on Twitter/Instagram. With a number of global events planned, traditional media kits for journalists  are available on the official website. Offering a traditional PR approach doesn’t mean they’ve ignored other social platforms, since Movember is a global enterprise, its activities have always played out on social channels. In addition to Twitter and Instagram, you’ll find Movember on Facebook, YouTube, and Snapchat, as well.

This year, expect to see even more content, photos, and videos on social platforms. Watch as the Movember Foundation encourages participants to document mustache growth on Snapchat or Instagram Stories while fundraising; or to interview fellow participants on Periscope. In December, part of the Movember Foundation’s continuing challenge is the question of how they’ll extend their brand for year-round donations. As they say: “The Movember Foundation is the only charity tackling men’s health on a global scale, year round. We have one goal: to stop men dying too young.” (Emphasis mine.) Let’s hope people hear their message.

As PR and marketing pros we’d love to know the secret sauce for a successful campaign. However, finding this elusive formula can be near impossible. But, the first step to success might be benchmarking your industry to spot trends that work. Put searches into your media intelligence platform, read up on what is working for others, adjust the formula for your brand, implement what seemingly works, and discard what doesn’t.

Let us know if you’re interested in seeing how this can work.

Hashtags for Health: Successful Social Media Campaigns

A thought leadership program for your brand’s executives can have wide-reaching impacts on your brand. If your executives have the ability to connect with audiences genuinely​, it’s important that they share their opinions about your company’s value proposition. Beyond name recognition, implementing this type of program allows you to discuss your brand story, in your brand voice; it can also open up opportunities for speaking engagements, conference panels, and other industry-related leadership gigs. Here are actionable guidelines to submit pieces to reputable media outlets as a guest blogger, bookmark and follow it when you’re ready.

Becoming a guest blogger or contributor on a popular website is a great way to build your personal brand. Publications are always looking for new contributors and do accept guest bloggers as guest blog posting is great for search engine optimisation (SEO). However, pitching proposals and guest posting for popular websites can be time-consuming. Each website has different requirements and instructions, such as including the right backlinks in your posts. To help you save time on sorting through the requirements and gathering information, we scoured the top websites for their submission guidelines and instructions on how you can start guest blogging for these websites that you feel are a good fit for your content marketing strategy.

Reading tip: How To Amplify Your Brand With a Blogger Outreach Campaign

Here is a quick overview of the publications and how to contribute as a blogger to the website with instructions and guidelines:

Guest Blogging and Contributor Guidelines and Instructions for 10 Popular Websites

Forbes.com is a high-quality website that focuses on news and information about business, investing, technology, entrepreneurship, leadership and affluent lifestyles.

To guest post: To be a regular contributor for guest blogging, you need to fill out this Google Docs form. The form will ask you for your LinkedIn and Twitter profiles, the concept for your “Forbes page” such as overall theme and story ideas. It will also ask why you are expert on the topic, and you will need to provide samples of your guest work.

Huffington Post is a publication that covers news, blogs and original content about U.S. politics, entertainment, style, world news, technology, and comedy.

To guest post: According to their contact page, visit this Google Doc page to submit your guest blog post idea and your author bio. They are looking for succinct, shareable and satisfying articles that will also perform well with SEO. Here is a helpful blog post on how to become a regular contributor. If you are a current contributor to Huffington Post, read this article.

Fast Company is a popular online business publication that covers technology, ethical economics, leadership and design. It says it is written for progressive business leaders to inspire readers and users ‘to think beyond traditional boundaries, lead conversations, and create the future of business,” according to their About page.

To guest post: According to their guidelines for submitting articles, your articles should be well-written, have the relevant keywords in your guest post, be between 750 and 900 words and be exclusive for Fast Company. They need to be complete, search engine optimized, top-notch and unpolished articles that are intended for Fast Company’s audience. Articles should have a tone appropriate to Fast Company and be written by a person, not a PR department. They are only accepting articles for their leadership section. Articles should be submitted to Associate Editor Rich Bellis at rbellis@fastcompany.com. They don’t want pitches, abstracts, outlines, press releases, or interview offers.

Entrpreneur.com is a publication geared toward business owners who are starting and growing their businesses. They cover actionable information and practical tips for startups.

To guest post: To become a contributor, fill out the form on their contributor page. It is almost identical to the Forbes contributor form in that they want to know your contact information, your LinkedIn and Twitter profiles, themes, story ideas, why you are expert on the topic, and samples of your guest blog work.

Inc.com is an online publication that writes articles for small businesses. They provide entrepreneurs with advice and tools.

To contribute: Visit their contact page to learn more and under “contributing to Inc.” they say to be a regular columnist, email contributors@inc.com. They don’t clarify on what they are looking for when it comes to guest blogging but your email should follow what Forbes contributor form and Entrepreneur contributor page are looking for with submissions.

Business Insider is a business publication that covers industry topics such as financial, media and technology.

To guest post: According to their contact page, you should email contributor@businessinsider.com and mention that you're submitting for a free guest post in the subject line. You should also consider sending a final draft of your article, a proposed headline, a brief author bio, and inbound links to other articles you have published. You may want to review their authors’ page to get an idea about what other contributors are writing about. Quality content marketing is an effective SEO strategy so make sure that you submit guest blog posts that are high-quality.

Business2Community is a publication that covers breaking news and top trends in social media, digital marketing, content marketing, social selling and social business.

To guest post: To contribute, visit their become a contributor page. As a guest, you will then need to read their contributor guidelines and fill out their online application form that includes your contact information, your website, and three writing samples or guest articles that show that you know the topic and you have quality blog posts from either your own blog or other guest blogging sites.

Social Media Today provides news, trends and best practices on social media and digital marketing.

To guest post: To become a contributor or blogger, there are two ways. You can register with the website to create blog posts that go directly to the website. They are looking for bloggers who want to provide exclusive posts that meet Social Media Today’s standards and will rank high when it comes to SEO. You can also set up your account to take in posts from the RSS feed of your blog. Social Media Today can pick from those posts to post on their blog. To learn more, visit their blogger approval and posting page.

Mashable is a publication that prides itself on being the “go-to source” for technology, digital culture and entertainment content.

To guest post: To contribute write blog posts, visit their submit news page. Fill out the form on the page to submit a guest post pitch, tip or article. They will ask you what type of submission: exclusive story, a news update, a hot tip, an editorial suggestion or other.

PR Daily is a daily news website that delivers news and advice about the PR, marketing, social media and traditional media worlds. Ragan.com delivers practice advice, real-world solutions and field-tested strategies for today’s communicator.

To guest post: To become a blogger or contributor to PRDaily.com and Ragan.com, visit the submit news page. They are looking for basic contact information, topic and your article. They will want to know if it is an aggregated news story, original story or column, a previously published blog post, a tip or other.

What other popular guest blogging sites would you add to this list?

An earlier version of this post appeared on the Knowledge Enthusiast blog.

This article was written by Matthew Royse from Business2Community and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.

How to be a Guest Blogger on 10 Popular Websites

Content marketing is a newish role, and we can’t always find that person with a journalism background. So what do you do? Spotting and mentoring talent has become an important skill for content marketing managers.

Creating engaging content continues to be a focus for content marketers, with 2016 Content Marketing Institute research citing it as the top priority for B2B (72 percent)  and B2C (56 percent) marketers. Content as a priority is due, in large part, to the difficulty in having the resources to create compelling content that maps to the varying stages of the buyer’s journey.

Many marketers pursue increasing their freelance writing budgets or syndicating content to fill those gaps. And although those are great tactics, they overlook a frequently underutilized content resource: your current staff outside of the content team.

Early in my content marketing career, I spotted a departmental administrative assistant with some extra time on her hands who had a knack for proofreading and copyediting. In fact, it turned out she had been doing significant research and rewrites for one of our team’s writers on a regular basis. Like any smart content marketer would, I sat down to talk to her about career goals and asked if she was interested in pursuing a marketing career. Once I found out that she was, I gave her bite-sized writing assignments, kept track of customer praise for her work and met with her regularly to provide mentoring and feedback.

In a few months, I was able to make the case for promoting her to a writer position on the team. Not only did this broaden our team’s writing bench strength, but it also launched her on a career path she’s still on today. As the manager who saw that initial spark, that feels great.

Who are good candidates for content mentorship? Of course, not everyone is interested in joining your content team. Many employees are happy to be right where they are with a full plate of duties. Still, I have consistently found content rock stars in a few of the same roles:

Product Managers: With insight into your product road map and a knowledge of your customer’s key issues your customers bring up, these folks can help you identify the day-to-day problems your customers face and how to fix them.

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