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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

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?
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

Your social media strategy doesn’t end with posting content and watching the likes and shares roll in. At some point, you need to step back from your campaigns and see how well you’re performing. That’s where social media reporting comes into play.

Social media analytics tools are essential for tracking your engagement, activities, and other important metrics. Some tools go a step further — compiling metrics and insights into presentation-ready, easy-to-understand reports. 

With comprehensive and consistent social reporting you can answer deeper-level questions about your performance, make decisions on how to improve, and illustrate how social media is contributing toward your wider business goals.

Read on for an all-in-one guide on how to use social media reporting in your strategy. 

Don't forget to download the ultimate guide to social media reporting and use our social media report template below to start implementing these reporting tips!

What Metrics Should You Include in Your Social Media Report?

How to Summarize & Present Your Social Media Reporting (free sample template)

Social media reporting is defined as using analytics to create reports regarding your social media campaigns and activity. 

Here's a quick overview of some of the data and metrics a social report can include:

Engagement metrics like shares, likes, comments, etc.

The actual items in your report may vary by social channels. Each platform has its own set of built-in analytics that track activity on your behalf. You can run reports in each of your social platforms to see which platform is the most valuable to your social strategy.

But checking individual platforms analytics can be time consuming and cumbersome — which isn't exactly sustainable as you scale your social program.

Let’s say you share your latest blog post on your Facebook page. You notice it gets a few likes and shares. Now, let’s say you share another blog the next week and it gets even more likes and shares than the first one. Why is the second post out-performing the first?

Is it because more people saw the second post? Did you gain some new followers since last week? Was it a more intriguing blog title?

The best way to answer these and other questions is to run a social media report on your key social media metrics.

Social media reports collect and compile the data behind your social marketing efforts. They provide quantitative insights, such as the number of mentions, engagement rate, and audience size. They can also give you qualitative data, such as your most popular content and brand sentiment analysis.

Reports are the difference between knowing with confidence how your campaigns and marketing strategy are performing versus going on a hunch. 

If you’re an agency, your clients want to see what you’re accomplishing on their behalf. You can present them with a social media metrics report demonstrating how you’re helping them achieve their goals.

Or if you’re working on an in-house team, reports can show your boss exactly what you’re doing on the company's social media channels. You can analyze reports to see where you’re doing well and where you can improve.

With up-to-date social media data in hand, you can make better use of your time, budget, and energy and leave much of the guesswork behind. 

Tip: A social media report may also help you answer questions like, "What is the best time to post on social media?" or "How is cross-posting impacting my social engagement?". 

Before you can start leveraging social reporting, you first need to consider which metrics you want to measure. Social media managers don’t create reports because they look nice — it’s what’s in those reports that matters most.

Let’s look at some things to consider including in a social media report:

What are the use-cases of the report? You might want to measure the in-depth performance of a specific campaign, high-level engagement on LinkedIn, or how many new followers you get on Instagram. You might want to look at real-time data or short-term vs long-term gains. Focus on metrics that support your goals so that non-essential details don’t get in the way.

What time period are you covering? You can generate a weekly report, quarterly report, or look at progress month-over-month. Or, you might want a longer report that covers your all-time stats.

Who is the report for? Just like creating content for your target audience, your social reports should be tailored to the person who needs to know what you’re sharing. If it’s your marketing manager, they’re likely familiar with the metrics and analytics terms. If it’s for a boss who doesn’t spend much time with social media marketing, you may need to spell out the role and importance of certain metrics.

What do you need to measure? Circle back to the goal of the report and think about the quantitative and qualitative metrics that support your goal. For example, if you’re running a campaign to increase sales, then you might look at sign-ups, audience growth, post reach, and click-through rates. On the other hand, if your goal is to get new email subscribers, looking at new followers wouldn’t be relevant.

Once you know what metrics and KPIs to measure, you can start creating your social media report.

Note: The metrics you focus on in your report may vary based on the objective of the report. For example, a social listening report can help you determine how your content, brand, and campaigns are being perceived online, which is very different than a social media report analyzing your content's performance.

Let’s look at social media reporting through the lens of each platform’s analytics:

Facebook Page Insights and Audience Insights

Facebook offers two types of analytics: Page Insights and Audience Insights.

Facebook Page Insights offer engagement-related metrics, such as post clicks, comments, views, post reach, and video views.

Audience Insights shares more information about your audience as well as the Facebook population at large. You can drill down into metrics like age, gender, geographic location, education, interests, and other useful data.

Both can be helpful as you’re planning your content marketing and ad campaigns. Use these reports for market research to learn more about the people you’re targeting.

Because Facebook owns Instagram, you can track paid ads on Instagram through the Facebook Ads Manager. In addition, Instagram has its own set of analytics. Get insight into metrics like:

Click-through rates to a landing page or website

Number of unique users that have seen your posts

Similar to Facebook, Instagram also offers Audience Insights. Learn more about your audience demographics, such as age, location, gender, and times of day when your followers are most active.

Instagram Stories and Instagram Reels also offer analytics to track audience reach, impressions, and more.

Twitter Analytics offers basic insight into your content’s performance, such as:

Ad campaign performance and conversion tracking

As with other social media analytics tools, you can use these details to drive your user-generated content program and inform your social publishing strategies to appeal to the right people.

LinkedIn offers built-in analytics for business pages. Some of the metrics provided include:

Engagement metrics such as clicks, comments, and shares

One of the more unique aspects of analytics on LinkedIn is the content suggestions. The platform will recommend types of content to create to increase engagement. This can be very useful information to publish in a social media marketing report. 

Many marketers choose to create separate reports for each of their social networks. This allows you to separate your social media metrics by platform so you can judge each one’s performance individually.

Once you have your data, it’s time to put it together into a clean, usable format and share it with the right people.

Here’s a helpful format you can follow that captures all the details in a logical flow:

Starting with a simple summary that shares engagement, follower change, and impressions by channel is a great introduction to a social media report. From here you can present your hypotheses, insights, and takeaways based on what the numbers say. 

Other overview slides that are useful to include in your intro include: paid, earned, owned performance, brand mentions report, and brand tracking report.

The intro presents the numbers. Then you need to present the why behind the numbers, what they mean and how they will influence the strategy going forward. Here you can also talk about any wins, accomplishments, or learnings. 

You could also dive into the results of various experiments you're currently running on social, such as specific hashtags or using more of a particular post style to see if it generates more engagement from your followers.

Whenever possible, including charts, graphs, or other visuals to help tell your story. Take screenshots of your analytics dashboards to make your report more compelling.

Try to include some actionable takeaways from the report. Talk about ways you might improve your efforts in future campaigns. For example, if you notice that engagement on Instagram has really taken off, you might consider allocating more resources to advertising on Instagram next time.

To help you get started with your social reporting, we developed this template to help you capture essential metrics. Download the free template.

To truly take your reporting to the next level you may want to consider using a social media management platform that can automate your reporting. 

With templated dashboards, as well as customizable dashboards, that can be downloaded or shared via email, a solution like Meltwater can eliminate the work of manual reporting — giving your more time back in your day to optimize your social media strategy. 

Get in touch by filling out the form below to demo our social media reporting and analytics available. 

Complete Guide to Social Media Reporting

The Met Gala is one of the biggest nights in fashion and entertainment, especially when it comes to online discussion. Bringing together the biggest celebrities in the world, dressed by the biggest luxury brands in the world, the event is a fundraiser for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. This year’s theme was “The Garden of Time” in reference to the Met’s current exhibition “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion.” We used our Meltwater consumer intelligence solution to uncover the biggest insights and takeaways from the event. 

Interested in digging in for yourself? Check out a snapshot of social data from this year’s Met Gala in our exclusive insights dashboard.

The biggest day for the Met Gala is the day after

Conversations about the Met Gala jumped markedly on May 6, the day of the event, but they really surged on May 7. That morning, there were already more than 2.2 million posts about it, which racked up more than 65.7 million engagement actions. 

Nevertheless, the three most engaging pieces of content mentioning the Met Gala were posted the day of and the day before. The second- and third-most engaged posts focused on fan favorite looks, Mindy Kaling’s swirling dress by Gaurav Gupta and Chadwick Boseman’s Versace suit from his attendance in 2019. Together, they generated more than 645,000 engagement actions and counting. However, the post that got the most engagement features a look that wasn’t even at the event. 

This post on X, featuring an AI-generated image pulled from Katy Perry’s Instagram account, generated more than 348,000 engagement actions as of the morning of May 7.

Stray Kids helped Tommy Hilfiger score big on social

This year, Tommy Hilfiger unexpectedly beat out maisons like Margiela and Burberry to be the most visible brand on the carpet. This was due to its partnership with K-pop boy band Stray Kids. All eight members, attending as Tommy Hilfiger’s guests, were dressed in Tommy as they became the first K-pop band to attend the Met Gala as a group.

The innovative move highlights how luxury brands can leverage stardom and dedicated, global fan bases at high-profile events.

As the chart above shows, Margiela scored the furthest reach of the featured brands, and it’s all thanks to Zendaya. Not only was she the most-talked-about host of the night, but mentions of her also generated more engagement actions than those of any other individual celebrity.

Before the event began, the actor was already one of the most anticipated attendees of the night. Her appearance capped off two long, fashion-forward press tours for her films Dune 2 and Challengers, and she rose to the occasion in not one but two Margiela gowns. Both looks, and her outfit change, drove the conversation.

The second most talked about co-host of the night was Bad Bunny, who also wore a custom Margiela look. However, by sentiment, Jennifer Lopez, who wore a Schiaparelli gown, was the runner-up co-host.

Our analysis found that hats and headpieces, or the lack thereof, were the most talked about accessories of the event, beating out jewelry, watches, and bags. For example, Bad Bunny and Zendaya’s Margiela headwear generated a lot of buzz, as did Sarah Jessica Parker’s sculptural headpiece by Philip Treacy. 

Notably, Schiaparelli generated the most headwear buzz by not having any at all in its look for Jennifer Lopez. The farthest-reaching content mentioning Schiaparelli and headwear was an allure.com article titled, “Only Jennifer Lopez Could Get Away with Wearing a Messy Bun to the Met Gala.”

Smaller brands generated the most conversations about the theme

Each year, celebrities and the brands that dress them are judged for how well they embodied the gala theme. This year’s theme, “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion,” and dress code, “The Garden of Time,” was interpreted in many imaginative ways, but no brand was mentioned in relation more than Loewe. 

The brand, which was also a co-sponsor of the event, dressed multiple attendees, including Anna Wintour and Ariana Grande. Still, Loewe mentions only accounted for 9.7% of the overall conversation about brands and the theme, while 17.9% mentioned brands outside of the top 20 analyzed. For example, Loewe’s white lace floral dress for brand ambassador Greta Lee was a popular, on-theme look from the night, but so was Doja Cat’s wet T-shirt dress by Vetements, which took the theme in an innovative direction by highlighting “the world’s most-used flower… cotton.” 

Compare this brand spread to last year’s when Chanel came out on top, as expected, with 27.2% SOV. The 2023 gala theme honored designer Karl Lagerfeld, who was the artistic director of Chanel from 1982 until his death in 2019. This year’s numbers may suggest that many designers had a harder time interpreting “The Garden of Time” or ignored it altogether. 

Many more topics emerged from Met Gala 2024, including the presence of jewelry producers and how topics like sustainability and inclusion fared against geopolitics. Dive into the data first-hand with our exclusive insights dashboard. 

Looking to get tailored insights into the retail sector? See how with a demo of the Meltwater Suite.

The Met Gala 2024: A Social Media Deep Dive

There’s a lot of confusion around the idea of optimizing a press release for SEO, which can lead to wasted effort and disappointing results. In this article we’ll address some of the most common misconceptions about SEO optimization for press releases, and give you the truth about how they can really be used to improve your organic search traffic. 

We’ll start by covering some basic principles of Search Engine Optimization, and then dig into the role that press releases can play in the process.

The goal of SEO is to ensure that all of the pages on your website consistently appear at the top of search engine results when people search for the words and phrases that are most relevant to the products and services you sell.

There are two main components of SEO strategy, on-page and off-page: 

On-page SEO refers to all of the things on your website that you can control, and includes everything from the content in individual pages to the overall structure of the site, all kinds of technical issues like the performance of the underlying code, the size of image files and so on. 


Off-page SEO is all about how your website is connected to the rest of the web, and mostly focuses on encouraging other websites to link to your own. By increasing the number of inbound links from good quality websites, you improve your SEO. 

So where do press releases fit into all of this, and why would you want to optimize them?

What are benefits of press release submission in SEO?

5) How To Maximize the Reach of Your SEO Press Release Using Press Release Services

The original purpose of a press release was to inform the media of important news from your business. Before the internet, hard copies were sent by mail to newsrooms, where journalists would painstakingly sift through them every day looking for any which might be of interest for stories they’re working on. 

When the world moved online, so did press releases, eventually finding a new purpose on the web. A new wave of online press release distribution services gave PR executives the ability to push their releases out across the web. Copies of a release could exist on the newswires and on global media websites which often re-published them verbatim, and if you included links to your own website in the release, that would easily give you potentially thousands of backlinks, often from high quality editorial media sites. 

Very quickly the SEO value of online press releases overshadowed their original purpose of informing the media about new developments. Naturally, this easy route to building high value backlink became widely exploited, with SEO consultants spamming the newswires with releases about their clients to boost their rankings. 

The search engines soon caught on and devalued links from press releases, so they could no longer be used in that way.

In the context of easy link-building, press releases are no longer useful for SEO. But that’s not to say they have no value, because press releases can still serve other purposes which have an indirect benefit to our search rankings. 

As press releases aren’t an easy route to backlinks any more, they have reverted back to their original purpose, informing journalists and influencers about news from your business. And it’s in this way that they can help you to improve your organic rankings, by capturing the attention of writers and winning you good quality coverage in the media. 

Here are five tips to optimize a press release for SEO: 

If you spam out too many press releases about every little thing that happens at your business, they simply won’t be effective. Learn to tell the difference between a story that matters only to people who work at your company, and one that will genuinely be of interest to your customers and potentially the wider public. Honestly, most people don’t care that you hired a new Chief Whatever Officer, so that release is going to end up as digital landfill which will have achieved nothing except to waste your time. 

It’s also counterproductive to push out too many uninteresting press releases, because the journalists and influencers you’re trying to reach will get into the habit of ignoring or even blocking your updates, so even when you do have something interesting to say, they won’t notice. 

So, only send out press releases when you have something to say that matters. Put yourself in the shoes of the audience that you’re ultimately trying to reach, and ask yourself why they invest some of their attention span to reading what you have to say. But also think about the writer, because they are the filter between you and the audience, so your press release needs to make a strong case for why they should cover your story. 

Assuming you have a strong story, you next need to think about how to structure your release in a way that presents it in the most effective way. For that, you should understand a technique that all journalism students learn.

A press release is, essentially, the ideal story you would like a journalist to write about your business. Of course, no journalist worth their salt would publish a press release verbatim, but if you can give them a strong story presented in a format that’s very close to something they would write themselves, you increase your chances of earning some coverage. 

So, all good news stories start with a headline that succinctly captures the meat of your story. The opening paragraph should contain all of the important facts and details to outline exactly what’s happened, and why it matters to the reader. 

As you continue to expand upon your story, you can include more background information and context, including quotes from relevant people. 

The point of using the Inverted Pyramid is that no matter how much of the story they read, the audience should have a good idea of what it's all about. If they only skim the headline, that should still get your main message, and if they happen to read further down the page, they will get additional information which broadens their understanding. 

Don’t forget to add contact details at the bottom of your release in case the writer wants more information.. 

Your goal is to convince journalists or influencers to write about your story, and ideally to include a backlink to your website when they publish. This will result in a high-quality link from a trusted media source on a page that’s full of contextually relevant information about your business, which is very valuable in SEO terms. 

So do your best to give the writer everything they might need, and eliminate any potential barriers to them writing the story for you. This means your release should include: 

A choice of high quality images to illustrate the story. Photos of products and key people, charts and illustrations - anything relevant to the announcement. 

The name and contact information of somebody they can speak to about the story. 

A selection of quotes to use - ideally from customers or partners as well as your own spokespeople. 

Key facts and figures about your business, in case they are unfamiliar with you. 

If you consistently make the process as seamless as possible for them, over time you’ll secure more media coverage. 

If a high profile media organization or influencer writes about your announcement, that’s always going to have a lot of value for your business. But if the story includes a link to your website, then it’s worth a lot more because of the positive impact on your SEO, so you should do what you can to encourage the writer to include the link. 

First of all, decide which page you want them to link to, and ensure that’s the only link featured in your press release, with the exception of your corporate website homepage which should be included in your company information. The point is to avoid overwhelming them with choice - if there’s only one link in the release, that’s most likely the one they’ll use. 

To increase the odds of this happening, make sure that the page you want them to link to features plenty of useful information about the subject of the story - give them a good reason to send their readers to that page. Don’t be afraid to ask for the link in your covering email; a simple note like “Your readers can find all the useful information here [LINK] is often all it takes.”

But don’t be pushy about asking for links, as this is likely to offend some journalists, and in many cases it might be against their editorial guidelines and therefore out of the writer’s hands entirely. 

The shotgun approach just doesn’t work for press releases, it’s spammy and will eventually cause people to stop paying attention to your announcements. It’s far more effective to use a targeted approach to media outreach, which delivers better ROI on your time investment. 

You can use a tool like Meltwater Media Relations to identify journalists who have already covered similar topics to your announcement, which means they’re already more likely to be interested in what you have to say. Because the tool gives you background information about each journalist, you can more easily tailor your individual outreach emails to resonate better with them, which helps build ongoing relationships and makes securing future coverage easier. 

The days of being able to quickly get a lot of backlinks by regularly pushing out press releases on distribution wires are, thankfully, gone. The most sustainable way to approach link-building now is to reach out to relevant media, whether they’re legacy media or social influencers, whenever you genuinely have something interesting to announce, and use well crafted press releases to give them everything they need to write about your business. 

If you're ready to start improving your search rankings with media outreach, get in touch for a demo of our Media Relations tool. 

5 Tips on How to Optimize a Press Release for SEO

Note: This blog is based on the Global Digital Report 2024 – produced in partnership with Meltwater and We Are Social. See Simon Kemp's article about The Changing World of Digital in 2024. Download the Global Digital Report 2024 and the Global Digital Report 2023 for free.

In today's digital age, marketers, influencers, and organizations must grasp their audience’s online usage dynamics to make an impression. This article will examine the changing trends and user behaviors influencing Malaysia's digital environment by reviewing its social media statistics over the previous year.

Our main focus this year is to look at how Malaysians are becoming reliant on social media for everything from personal relationships to doing business and sharing information. The ever-increasing popularity of social media sites like TikTok demonstrates how our culture is becoming more wired and tech-savvy. By delving into Malaysia's social media statistics, we will discover how these platforms transform into digital marketing and ecommerce industry leaders and their traditional role as communication facilitators.

Keep an eye out for our Global Digital Report 2024, which covers all the bases, including the present state of social media in Malaysia and its changing trends. Whether your goal is to enhance your digital presence or gain an understanding of Malaysia's digital scene, this article will provide you with the tools you need to succeed in the country's dynamic social media landscape.

Social media usage statistics in Malaysia

What's ahead for social media in Malaysia in 2024?

In 2024, Malaysia has shown a willingness to embrace digital connection, as seen by the general social media statistics from the previous year. The country's overall population has grown to 34.49 million, and digital usage is seeing a consistent increase year after year. Connectivity has become essential in Malaysian life, as seen by the 1.1% growth in online engagement to 97.4% of the population. In addition, the number of social media user identities has increased by 20%, with a current total of 28.68 million people actively maintaining a social media presence.

The minor rise in cellular mobile connections, currently at 44.55 million, comprising 129.2% of the country's total population, shows the significance of mobile connectivity in Malaysians' daily lives.

Among internet users between the ages of 16 and 64, 98.5% own a mobile device, an increase of 0.9% from the previous year, representing near-universal mobile phone ownership. Desktop computers and laptops continue to be common, with 69.3% of users having one or more devices, up 1% from the previous year. These constant increases further demonstrate the significance of popular gadgets for gaining access to the internet and social media. 

A noteworthy trend to observe is the rapid expansion of smart gadgets. The ownership of smart watches or wristbands increased by 5.1%, the use of TV streaming devices by 15.4%, and the adoption of smart home devices by 8.6%. The increasing number of linked smart gadgets in Malaysian households gives residents more power and ease of use, and it's clear that the country's residents are becoming increasingly in tune with more interconnected and advanced forms of technology.

Looking at the bigger picture of Malaysian social media statistics in 2024, we see that internet and social media usage have been two constants regarding the country's media consumption. The average time Malaysians spend online has increased by 2.5% over the previous year, reaching 8 hours and 17 minutes. Around a quarter of this online time is spent on social media, with users spending an average of 2 hours and 48 minutes daily on these sites—a 0.7% increase. Although not significant increases, these figures represent Malaysians' steady presence on the internet over the previous year.

Various forms of media consumption have decreased, in contrast to the slight increase in internet and social media use. Specifically, television and radio have seen 9.4% and 13.8% decreases, respectively; there has also been a 4.4% decline in podcast engagement, indicating a change in content consumption habits in digital platforms.

Discovering what draws Malaysians to the internet and social media will be the next step in delving deeper into Malaysia's online landscape. Looking closely at these social media statistics will help us understand which platforms are popular and what kind of content is popular with Malaysians, enabling us to navigate the country's move towards digitalization.

Key internet usage statistics point to a steadily connected Malaysia in 2024, where internet use has been constant. In 2024, 97.4% of Malaysians have access to the internet, making up 33.59 million people, the same amount of internet users from the prior year.

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