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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

OK, let’s be real: “social media audit” doesn’t exactly sound like an enjoyable prospect in the field of social media management. In fact, it sounds a bit scary. Like someone knocking on your door with a menacing badge, here to audit your accounts and give you a laundry list of things you need to do to fix them.

So let’s call it something a wee bit more fun like social media spring cleaning! 🧹

A social media audit is a great opportunity to revisit the nuts and bolts of the social media machine that you’ve built for your brand and make sure everything is still shipshape.

Our Social Media Audit Checklist outlines the 10 steps required to conduct a thorough audit. Download the free template to check each step off as you make your way down the list.

Tip: Learn how to perform a full content audit.

A social media audit is a check-in opportunity for you to understand what’s happening on each of your social media channels. This is the time you set aside to:

Learn what’s working and what’s not about your current strategy

Use a social listening tool to check what your competitors are posting on social media

Refresh your profiles with new cover photos, descriptions, etc.

Analyze metrics and view the performance from the past weeks, months, or year

And, finally, update your governance structure and admin permissions  

One of the main goals of an audit is to determine what’s working and what’s not. (Note: your conclusions should be based on any previous social media KPIs you had in place. If they don’t fit anymore, use this audit to make updates). 

During the process, you’ll learn how you’re measuring up on social through analyzing engagement metrics like impressions, comments, and shares of your content. You may also want to take this time to set up a Google Analytics report to look at how much traffic or goal completions are being generated by visitors directed to your website from social.  

You can also use a social media audit to check who you’re following and do some spring cleaning there as well. The general rule is you want to be following fewer accounts than are following you. 

Maybe you’re still following an old partner that you’re no longer in business with. Or your boss's wife’s cousin's Instagram that is devoted entirely to her cat. 😳 Look, we know Snuggles is adorable, but does he fit with your brand? (If so, lucky you!).

A social audit is also good for refreshing your profile's look & feel, checking on your competitors, auditing permissions, setting up analytics reports, and more. 

The best place to start a social media audit is with the numbers. 

Create a simple spreadsheet to record analytics like follower count, engagement metrics, and how many posts you send per week per social media account. Then, you’ll know which social channels to focus on first for updating and optimizing. You can also get fancy by using our template deck for social media reporting!

Going forward, you should plan to use this spreadsheet or deck on a regular basis to track your progress. A weekly metrics report of your engagement numbers is recommended if you want to get granular, but monthly is fine too. The main point is to build learnings over time and get some statistical significance around what your followers like and don’t like.

Once you have the numbers in front of you as a baseline, be clear about your goals. 

Tip: Don’t do a social audit just to do it. Make sure you have some idea about what you want to learn, so you can proceed confidently with any changes.

Get ready to take your social marketing strategy to the next level this year with these simple but fruitful social auditing steps: 

1. Audit permissions on all your social media profiles

When was the last time you took a look at who had permission to manage your Facebook Page, Instagram feed, or third-party app that posts across multiple sites? 

The reality is that a lot of us use multiple sites, tools, and logins — and this makes the permissions piece a tricky one, as employees change roles or leave companies. 

Only those people that need permissions should have permissions on your social media channels. Login to everything and make sure that your permissions are up to date and in-line with your current employees and their job descriptions. Update passwords if necessary. 

Tip: Learn how to conduct a Twitter audit to spot fake followers.

2. Revisit your branding, language, and positioning

Has it been more than a year since you changed out your X (formerly Twitter) header image or Facebook banner? If so, it’s probably time for a refresh: no audit is complete without a design update. 

When you look at your social media profiles, think about what they are telling the world about your company. What’s the brand story? It’s possible that your corporate positioning has changed since last year, so an audit is where you can update this.

Make sure your new choices still reflect and evoke your current brand personality and values

Your social media bio should give visitors to your profile a quick snapshot of who you are and what you do. It’s the ideal place to include a branded hashtag or campaign hashtag, and link to other brand accounts (a good idea for global brands).

When writing your bio for social media, remember to keep it short and sweet for X and Instagram. These are great channels for using emojis, have a bit of fun, or put some edginess into describing your product or service.

Patagonia, for example, uses far less than the character count allowed on Instagram for a simple but powerful message:

Facebook and LinkedIn are where you have a little more room to go into detail, and business pages tend to be more professional in tone.

Lastly, double-check the website URL you’re linking to from your bio. This is especially important on Instagram due to the fact that you can’t link from posts, so “link in bio” lingo is commonplace for promoting specific campaigns, products, or landing pages. But it can be easy to forget to change it back to your homepage once a campaign is over.

Guess what? No matter how tempting it may be you don’t actually have to be on every single social media platform. Your social media strategy will suffer if you spread yourself too thin. 

Is there a channel you were once active on but is barely maintained due to either team bandwidth, lack of knowledge on how to use it effectively, or a disengaged following? Now might be the time to cut the cord. 

While this may seem to contradict what we just said, hear us out. 

Think ahead for your marketing strategy. If there is a channel you’d like to use but don’t have the manpower to invest in right now, you should still claim your handle as a business account on that platform. This is particularly important if your business name is a common word or combination of words. 

The importance of engagement on social media cannot be overstated. Especially if people are already talking to you! Encourage positive word of mouth by interacting with your followers. 

A policy review of your response templates and community management guidelines is a good step for your social media audit. This review should cover things like: 

Who is responsible for responding on social media on behalf of your brand?

Do you use GIFs, photos, emojis? What kind?

Who should step in when an event needs to be escalated? 

If you come up against a crisis, make sure you have a real-time alerting system in place. 

Who doesn’t love a good list? This is perhaps the most underutilized tool in a social media manager's arsenal. 

Facebook has interest lists for social ads, YouTube has playlists...if you’re not using these, now’s a great time to start. If you are, use your social audit to revisit them and make sure that they’re cleaned up and full of the people and content you want. 

“If it’s not broke, don’t fix it” is a delicate rule to follow when it comes to social media. On the one hand, you want to continue experimenting and trying new things — especially when platforms introduce new tools and features.

But on the other hand, you can’t ignore which types of posts perform the best for you per platform.

You may discover for example that on Instagram your audience responds highly to monochromatic photos, and on LinkedIn, polls don’t perform as well for you as for your competitors — so you either need to stop doing them, or look at a complete overhaul of the questions you're asking. Or move polls to Instagram Stories and see if they perform better on that channel. 

Options await you with a social audit of your top-performing content!

Checking audience data may reveal certain opportunities for your social media marketing strategy. In particular, you may discover micro-communities based on shared values or interests. These niche groups are perfect places to get to know how your audience interacts and what pain points they have that your brand can solve. 

Another great thing that gathering consumer insights can reveal is commonalities in influencers or celebrities that they follow. You can then approach them for an influencer partnership.

Tip: Learn how to do an influencer marketing competitor audit using our free influencer marketing competitor audit template.

Identify 3-5 competitors to monitor on social media by using competitive analysis software like the Meltwater media intelligence platform. Keep up with the type of content they share, the frequency, and how much engagement they get from their followers. 

It’s also a good idea to analyze the accounts their followers follow. This will most likely look similar to your audience, but any anomalies or things that stand out will be worth looking into.

Finish up your social media audit with a plan to report on your channel performance on a monthly basis with your full marketing team. 

Engagements (Impressions, Comments, Likes, Shares, Clicks)

And that’s a wrap! Are you feeling ready to spring clean with an audit on social media? Doesn’t sound so scary now, right? 

Remember, you can easily refer to all the steps above by downloading our Social Media Audit Checklist infographic. 

How To Do a Social Media Audit in 10 Easy Steps

Many social media marketer typically starts their day by scanning their social listening platform of choice, maybe 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.

They also need to respond to whatever requests land in their inboxes from PR and marketing teams. Sounds a bit haphazard, right? This recurring set of activities isn’t a sustainable or efficient social media workflow. 

For one thing, having a casual approach to social media activities can make it nearly impossible to go on vacation. For this reason and more, it’s important to create a social media calendar.

Get pro tips on how to run a successful social media program by studying some of the brands that are doing it right. Download our Ultimate Guide to Social Media Management today or read our Social Media Management Blog.

What Are The Benefits Of A Social Media Calendar?

What to Include in a Social Media Content Calendar

Getting Started with Creating a Social Media Calendar

A social media calendar is a working document used to schedule the social media content you will post across all of your platforms for the month, week, day, or even the time of day. 

A calendar like this serves as a communication tool for content review, putting the copy, images, and hashtags all in one place. It is often a feature of social media publishing tools and social media engagement software. 

Social media calendars are crucial because they allow you to plan ahead and make sure that you send the right message, to the right audience, at the right time.

Tip: Download our free Social Media Holidays Calendar and check out our Ultimate Guide to 2024 Social Media Holidays.

Preparing and following a content plan for planning and scheduling social media posts has many benefits, including:

Enhancing your planning and time-management

There's more, so keep reading to get your social media marketing workflow right with a content calendar.

Here's a free social media content calendar template you can use to get started!

In today’s marketing landscape, social media management goes far beyond just posting content on TikTok and Instagram. It’s become very important to ensure that your brand’s social media presence and activity coordinates with other time-sensitive content like TV ads or PR campaigns. 

Having a central place for different teams across your organization to see what social media content is planned, and when, allows you to better implement strategies to meet your social media marketing goals. 

When your content consistently appears on your audience’s feed, it becomes much easier to create two-way engagement on social media. Impressive online engagement increases your organic reach through a platform’s algorithm, which means that your posts get shown to new people, and you're more likely to get more followers. 

Another reason why you need a posting schedule is to be more organized. Who doesn't want that? When you stick to a social media content calendar, you're able to plan ahead and create larger volumes of content so you're not scrambling day by day. 

From saving you time to allowing you to align your content to your business objectives, let's explore the many advantages of planning out your content according to a social media content calendar. 

1. You can share an engaging mix of content types

Once you start documenting social media content in a calendar format, you’ll notice posting patterns that lean towards sharing certain content types significantly more often than others. 

While it’s unlikely that you’ll ever end up with a perfect balance of videos, visuals, and written content, a social media calendar makes sure you won’t leave out key content types on a regular basis. This approach also provides you with more data on the kind of content sparks the most engagement.

For example, you might share a new blog post each Wednesday and an inspiring image each Friday. Create placeholders in your social media 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. 

Share the blog on your social media accounts

Plan recurring posts on social media, switching up the text that accompanies the link

2. Helps you create consistency across channels

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

Viewing copy for each channel will prevent you from sounding like two or three different personalities. And will help avoid misfires, such as sharing conflicting information about the same event.

Ask yourself, "What’s my goal with this post?" Do you want to generate traffic, increase engagement, or share important information without engagement being the main goal? 

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

Tip: Add a note detailing the type of content you are posting (e.g. event, blog, campaign, etc). 

Having this information visible ensures you plan for a good variety of content. Try to alternate between different types as much as possible. When the content is promoting your brand, it's generally best practice to avoid "sales-y" language and use engaging CTA’s.

4. Post about what your audience is interested in

When planning out your posts, it's important to know what topics are dominating the conversations online and use those trending themes as inspiration when creating your social media posting schedule.

To help you choose subjects for your social media content calendar, take a look at a keyword research tool like Google Keyword Planner to understand what your audience is searching for, then engage around these topics.

You can also use a social listening tool like Meltwater to uncover trending themes in your industry, which will not only help you be seen but also help boost your status as a thought leader. 

Make sure the subject of your post is clear and engaging. For example, the headline “10 easy tricks for irresistible headlines” is much more attention grabbing than “How to write a headline.” 

Keep this in mind when titling your content and drafting your captions. But don't get too “clickbaity” with your post copy! The caption you write must accurately describe the content your linking to; otherwise people will bounce off the page.

6. Incorporating important corporate initiatives 

Rather than leaving social media boosts for crucial promotions to the last minute, plan for their broadcast well in advance. When you schedule social media posts for your content, this allows you to plan for significant announcements, prepare appropriate images, create landing page URLs, etc. 

It’s not much of a vacation if you’re checking your cellphone every few minutes to monitor workplace social media accounts. But with a social media content calendar, your team has everything they need to keep the social content flowing in your absence. You can provide a detailed overview of the daily to do’s, write copy they can schedule, and ensure your team feels secure in knowing the status of social media programs, whether or not you’re there.

There are calendar, workflow, and strategy tools available for managing social media content calendars, including CoSchedule, Kapost, and Divvy HQ. However, you can get started by using a simple spreadsheet [Free Template]. 

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 calendar? Here's some ideas:

This may seem a bit 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. Think about #TBT (Throwback Thursday), #WCW (Woman Crush Wednesday) and, of course, #TGIF!

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

Each social media channel has its own characteristics, which is why some users favor one platform over another. For instance, on X, users log in to get real-time updates on the topics or events that they care about, whereas users on Facebook are engaging with content that 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 turn to 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 hashtags for all your posts. Creating a space in your social media calendar to save the hashtags you’d like to use for important subjects ensures consistent or varied use of hashtags and of course, saves you time!

To create your own social media posting schedule, you can start with a simple spreadsheet. However, using a community management tool will allow you to create a more visible, practical and actionable calendar through which you can plan, schedule and publish your posts. 

If you’re ready to get started with your own social media 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. 

To read more about how to run a successful social media program, download our Ultimate Guide to Social Media Management today.

Access your free social content calendar template here!

How to Create a Social Media Content Calendar

From reputation management obstacles to regulatory requirements to evolving consumer expectations, data-driven healthcare and pharmaceutical organizations certainly have their work cut out for them. 

No matter the objectives, an in-depth understanding of the market is essential for effective strategizing. With that in mind, we made our 2024 Consumer Insights: Healthcare report to give marketers in this industry a data-driven leg up. 

Using our suite of solutions, we analyzed online and media mentions related to three topics in this space: the patient journey, AI, and mis/disinformation. Along with highlighting notable stats and audience insights, our healthcare report offers actionable strategies healthcare and pharmaceutical marketers can use to:

Enhance their approach to reputation management

Build trust with consumers, patients, and healthcare professionals (HCPs)

Combat mis/disinformation with social marketing and PR

Download the 2024 Consumer Insights: Healthcare report for our full analysis and suggested strategies. In the meantime, here’s a quick overview of four need-to-know insights from the report.

Online conversations about finding healthcare are up 241% YoY

Our analysis found that mentions of keywords and phrases about finding healthcare have increased significantly, and many of those mentions are negative. 

As we explore more fully in the report, healthcare-related news stories can become lightning rods for complaints about the process of finding care and other stages of the patient journey. By zeroing in on these conversations, healthcare and pharmaceutical organizations can gain valuable insights into how to improve their customer experiences and brand management strategies.

Media coverage of health misinformation is at a four-year low 

Media coverage of health misinformation surged after the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, but it has since waned. 

As false health and medical information continues to rise on social media, there is increased pressure on healthcare organizations to make sure their audiences are informed. By combining social media monitoring and creative outreach strategies (such as audience-specific influencer partnerships), organizations can stay ahead of evolving health misinformation online.

Healthcare and AI conversation leaders are emerging in related communities 

Mentions of healthcare and AI across social media spiked on January 10, 2024 thanks to a post on X about the technology’s potential impact on medical research, HCP workloads, and assistive devices. 

That dramatic surge in mentions highlights the high hopes some audiences have for AI’s rise in healthcare and pharma sectors. For example, the author of the aforementioned post is a conversation leader in the disability and gaming communities.

Chatter about healthcare and AI from HCPs is up 290% YoY

As excitement about AI abounds, HCPs are taking to social media to share their valuable perspectives. However, unlike the example highlighted previously, HCP outlooks on AI aren’t always so rosy. Some of the most engaged posts on the topic from self-identified HCPs expressed doubt that AI could ever replace them at work, citing examples of existing inefficiencies or inadequacies. 

The Meltwater Blog

How To Do a Social Media Audit in 10 Easy Steps

How to Create a Social Media Content Calendar

4 Insights from Our Healthcare Report

5 Brands Making Waves on Reddit

Understanding Marketing ROI: Definition & Measurement

Designing and Refining Your Brand Identity

10 Important Guidelines for Employees on Social Media [Template]

What Does PR Automation Mean for PR Pros?

Making an Impact With Word-of-Mouth Marketing

Leveraging Social Media Insights

Social Media Research: A Comprehensive Guide

South Africa's Financial Services Industry: Top Marketing Trends