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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

People are talking about your brand. With the proliferation of social media, blogs, news outlets, podcasts, and other media channels, it’s getting harder for brands to keep up with all the places that mention them. That’s where media intelligence proves valuable.

Media intelligence, also known as media monitoring or media analysis, is very versatile. It helps companies uncover new opportunities for marketing, PR, sales, and comms and is especially useful for larger global enterprises.

By actively tracking your media coverage, you can stay on top of what people are saying about your company, products, services, competitors, or the industry at large. And when you’re able to manage your media coverage, you can also measure its ROI.

Let’s explore the role of media intelligence and how to go about using it in your marketing, PR, sales, and comms strategy.

Major Advantages of a Global Media Intelligence Solution

What to Ask Yourself Before Researching Media Intelligence Software

4 Ways to Use Media Intelligence Software

Creating a Single Source of Media Intelligence with Meltwater

Media intelligence is a powerful tool that helps businesses learn more about their customers, competitors, industry, and even their own brand via the media.

Companies can use media intelligence to detect trends, buying patterns, and consumer preferences; identify influencers; discover potential crises; and analyze the success of their campaigns.

https://meltwater-experience.pages.dev/meltwater-blog-micro-content/media-intelligence-slider

Media monitoring. Gone are the days of manually clipping stories from the newspaper. Today, technology can monitor multiple sources of traditional media, including television, radio, news, and more.

Social listening. Similar to media monitoring, social listening leverages technologies to track mentions and conversations across social media networks. Brands can track mentions of their name as well as competitors, products, services, hashtags, or other key terms.

Data analysis. Transforming the data these technologies collect is really what makes a media intelligence strategy tick. Data tools turn pieces of information into actionable insights and offer greater context into what the information means.

By tracking media mentions and coverage across multiple channels, brands gain a better understanding of their place in the market. They can learn how customers talk, feel, and think about their company. Most importantly, they can learn what their target audience responds to so they can craft more effective messages and campaigns.

Media intelligence offers a variety of benefits for companies of all industries and sizes.  Let’s look at a few practical uses.

Remove friction from the customer journey

A great media intelligence platform can show you pain points in the customer journey that prevent them from buying. In general, people are more open to sharing their true thoughts online than they are in person.

Monitoring their feedback in online reviews, social data, and other channels can give you on-demand insight into their experiences, allowing you to make certain changes and tweaks to the sales funnel that translate into more sales.

We’re living in an era where a brand’s reputation can be destroyed at the speed of a tweet. This might be a broad-level trend, such as sentiments about a particular industry, or it could be related specifically to your brand, product, service, or political candidate.

When a crisis starts trending, media intelligence can sound the alert so you can take swift action.

Through media intelligence, businesses can track media mentions in real-time and measure the impact of each campaign.

Let’s say you launch a new product and add an announcement on your website’s press page. It attracts the attention of 10 major news outlets, which share the press release on their own website and social networks. It also earns attention from a few niche bloggers who then post about it on social media and feature the product on their own blogs. This content is then shared by other content creators and distributors, helping you to gain even more exposure.

All of these mentions, links, and other content can be collected by your media intelligence solutions, allowing you to see the farthest-reaching impact of your campaign.

Media intelligence provides invaluable insights into a company's reputation. By learning how your target audience thinks and feels about your company at all times, you can see when your reputation is slipping and respond accordingly.

Having a global media intelligence service like Meltwater by your side, gives you comprehensive coverage, allowing you to keep tabs on your brand no matter who’s talking about it.

It’s even better when you have a single source of truth to rely on. These are just a few of the major advantages to having one global media intelligence partner:

You can compare apples to apples when it comes to reporting because data collection is unified.

Unified data and reporting make it easy for you to strategize from one single source of truth.

It tends to be cheaper, as you can benefit from economies of scale.

Tip: Read our Sales Intelligence Guide to understand how sales intelligence uses media intelligence.

Between social listening tools, social media monitoring tools, media monitoring tools, and other data-driven technologies, there’s more than one way to fuel your media intelligence strategy.

Consider the following questions when considering which media intelligence solution is right for you. 

Still on the fence? See why companies around the world choose Meltwater over other leading companies: compare top media monitoring software.

1. Do you have a complex problem you’re trying to solve that may require a custom-built media intelligence solution?

Global organizations need global solutions. For companies dealing with worldwide teams and leadership suites, off-the-shelf tools just won’t cut it for solving your needs at scale. They can tailor solutions based on your specific KPIs and global or local requirements.

2. Are you concerned about a lack of a single source of truth in your reporting efforts?

Having your media intelligence coming from one centralized vendor, you can trust that your teams are using the same data, KPIs, and reporting systems.

This keeps measurement consistent and reduces siloed working, meaning you can benchmark regional teams against each other and against your global and local competitors from a single source of truth.

It also lowers the chance of duplicating work, while helping you to truly see where your budget is best spent.

If you need media intelligence with a wide content scope, then opting for a global media intelligence vendor is key. Global partners tend to cater to both local and global source needs, so you’ll be covered on both fronts.

Looking into the third-party relationships that various media intelligence software have is also important. For example, with Meltwater, you’re able to benefit from our partnerships with leading news and social companies. We hold partnerships with a network of industry leaders so you can access more comprehensive coverage and insights. Get your free demo today!

Want to see media intelligence in action? Here are four key ways media intelligence can help you improve your comms, marketing, and PR strategies on a global scale.

1. Media intelligence for competitive analysis

One way we can use media monitoring is by benchmarking against our competitors and conducting competitor analysis. As well as understanding the tonality, trending themes, and media mention spikes around our own brand, we should be looking outside of our brand, too.

Looking at developing trends in your industry and comparing your performance to competitors helps to identify potential threats and opportunities. Has a competitor had a recent brand crisis? Insights gleaned through media intelligence help to provide ways to ensure the same doesn’t happen to you.

Media intelligence is also useful for targeting your comms to win over new business. For example, earlier in 2017, United Airlines staff dragged a customer off their plane. This caused a storm on social media. Other airlines were quick to react by promoting how friendly their own airlines were and highlighting policies around not dragging people off planes. We can find ways to respond to competitor slips by targeting our marketing communications at those affected.

Metrics to use when benchmarking your brand against competitors:

Share of voice. In what percentage of the conversation are you mentioned in comparison to competitors?

Sentiment. How positively or negatively are you discussed compared to your competitors?

Media exposure. How has media exposure around each brand increased or decreased over time?

Trending themes. What are the most frequently occurring keywords associated with each brand?

Negative trending themes. What are the most common complaints that your competitors are receiving?

Tip: Competitor analysis tools help you collect the right data and find insights.

2. Media intelligence for lead generation

It’s easy to find potential business opportunities with media intelligence. Look for the communities who are discussing the type of product or service you offer.

Meltwater’s boolean search functionality allows users to create very specific searches. For example, we could search for several different combinations of "Can anyone recommend a plumber." We can then analyze the online conversations around this query and reach out accordingly to promote our services.

Another method of media monitoring for leadgen is by looking for people who are discussing competitors. Those asking for recommendations or discussing your competitors are the best people to target — you already know they have a need you can fill. 

Alternatively, you can use media monitoring to research potential customers. H+K strategies use Meltwater to understand more about the clients they’re pitching to:

I’ll look at their online media coverage over a 6-12 month period and analyze what media they’ve been featured in, the tone of conversations, whether they’ve had any big spikes around launches or crises and then do the same around their key competitors.” – Roxana Tintea, Planning & Insights Manager at Hill + Knowlton Strategies.

This helps them to personalize their pitch, as well as ensure they know as much about their future clients as possible.

3. Media intelligence for customer experience

Customer experience is not always about bringing on new business. Companies need to also ensure they’re doing everything they can to retain the customers they already have.

Meltwater’s Real-time Alerting tool uses artificial intelligence to detect anomalies across different sectors such as social media, advertising spend, and search engine marketing. The anomalies can alert you to important changes outside of your company.

A football stadium, for example, can track the social coverage within the geo-location of the match — even if the fans fail to mention the stadium or club name. The fans just need to be located within the geo-fenced area set. If a number of people within the geo-location complain that the line is too long for the hotdog stand, you will receive an alert. This feature means you can quickly resolve customer complaints before more people are affected by it and it ripples out into a PR crisis, resulting in a deluge of negative stories surrounding your brand.

We can also use our social media monitoring suite to quickly react to online discussions. Using advanced media monitoring solutions like Meltwater means you don’t have to rely on users ‘@ mentioning’ you — they often won’t — and you could end up missing a question or complaint.

Many users of media monitoring tools only apply them at the most basic level — to discover PR hits. This is great; however, we can also look at PR hits in more detail.

Meltwater’s Google Analytics integration allows users to analyze the effect particular PR hits have had on website traffic. The widget displays the sessions and referred sessions to a selected website against the media exposure for a Meltwater news or social search.

Exploring referral traffic is handy for those wanting to understand which outlets (such as press releases, blog posts, particular landing pages, or social channels) are driving the most traffic from earned coverage. You can then use the data to tweak your content strategy. For example, you may decide to produce additional content on the topic that’s resulted in the most website hits. You can also target future content to the publications that are influencing the most website traffic. 

Lastly, you can analyze trending themes, sentiment, social shares, and social media data to get the full picture of how people have responded to a particular piece of content.

Sentiment. Understand how the story has been received in editorial and on social

Media Exposure. Understand the impact of the coverage based on volume pick up

Google Analytics. Understand the impact of PR based on website traffic

Trending themes. Understand how the majority of people are reacting to the story

If you have a number of media intelligence suppliers across geographic locations, moving forward as a company can be challenging. Having a number of vendors involved means different methods, different KPIs, and different cost structures. This lack of consistency can cause an array of problems, such as skewing reporting numbers and inflating costs.

Meltwater's Media Intelligence Solution

This is why having a single media intelligence solution is crucial for global brands who want to get ahead. Meltwater provides an end-to-end media intelligence solution that combines social listening, media monitoring, and data analysis. Gain a single source of truth across more channels than any other platform, ensuring you never miss an opportunity to capitalize on your paid and earned media coverage.

Curious how Meltwater Media Intelligence solutions can help your team achieve success? Fill out the form to get a free 15-minute product demo. 

Media Intelligence: Definition and Use Cases

If you thought digital growth was starting to settle into a more predictable pattern, prepare yourself for some surprises. 

Our new Digital 2023 July Global Statshot Report – published in partnership between We Are Social and Meltwater – reveals a wealth of important headlines and trends, including:

A big new milestone for social media use;

The adoption of AI technologies by everyday internet users;

Changes in how the world accesses news content;

The surprising truth about gaming amongst older generations;

That’s just a brief taster of the insights you’ll find in the full report though, which is packed with 300+ slides exploring what people are really doing on the internet, social media, mobile devices, and online shopping platforms.

And given the importance of some of the latest trends and stories, we’ve produced an “extra large” Statshot this quarter, which includes additional insights into social media use and a whole section on digital news trends.

Tip: Take a look at The Global State of Digital in April 2023, at the Digital 2023 October Global Statshot Report, and at The Changing World of Digital in 2023.

In addition to thanking We Are Social and Meltwater for making these reports possible, I’d also like to offer my heartfelt thanks our wonderful data partners, without whom the Global Digital Reports series would be a lot less informative:

⚠️ Important advisory: significant changes

Before we begin this quarter’s analysis, please note that there have been some important changes to the source data that we include in the Global Digital Reports series over recent weeks:

As we highlighted last quarter, GWI revised its methodology starting with its Q4 2022 wave of research. As a result, please beware of comparing figures in this quarter’s report with data published in previous reports in this series, especially those published prior to April 2023.

We continue to see incongruous trends in the data published in the ad tools of various social media platforms. We’ll explore some of these changes in detail below, but please exercise caution when analysing trends in social media audience data.

For further details, please refer to our comprehensive guide to changes in data sources, research methodologies, and reporting approaches.

If you need fast insights, I’d recommend starting with the video below, which will help you understand all of this quarter’s top headlines and trends.

Once you’ve watched that, scroll down for the full report.

The complete Digital 2023 July Global Statshot Report

You’ll find this quarter’s complete report in the embed below (click here if that’s not working for you), but read on past that to find our in-depth analysis of what all these numbers actually mean.

As always, let’s begin with the latest headlines for digital adoption and use around the world:

Data from the United Nations shows that the world’s population had reached 8.05 billion by the start of July 2023. That figure was just under 1 percent higher than the figure for the same time last year, with the world’s population growing by 70 million over the past 12 months.

The latest analysis from GSMA Intelligence shows that there are now 5.56 billion unique mobile subscribers around the world, equating to 69.1 percent of the global population. Mobile phone adoption increased by 2.7 percent over the past year, thanks to almost 150 million new users.

The reported number of people using the internet has grown by 2.1 percent over the past year, to reach 5.19 billion in July 2023. This figure equates to 64.5 percent of the world’s population, although delays in reporting mean that actual internet penetration is likely higher than these figures suggest.

The number of active social media user identities now equates to 60.6 percent of the world’s population, with the global total reaching 4.88 billion in July 2023. Social media adoption increased by 3.7 percent since this time last year, thanks to the addition of 173 million new active identities.

That’s a handy overview of the latest global state of digital, but the real insights come when we dig deeper into the data, so let’s dive into this quarter’s numbers…

Kepios analysis reveals that a total of 4.88 billion distinct user identities accessed social media platforms over the past 30 days.

This figure equates to 60.6 percent of the world’s total population, marking yet another important milestone in global social media adoption.

It’s important to stress that this 4.88 billion figure doesn’t necessarily represent unique individuals, because active user identities likely include a number of duplicate and false accounts, as well as accounts that represent “non-human” entities such as businesses, pets, music bands, and the like.

However, with messaging platforms and social networks still the primary destinations for the world’s 5.19 billion internet users, the comparison between active user identities and population still provides a reliable benchmark for social media use.

This momentous milestone in social media adoption comes just 20 years after the advent of the first “fully fledged” social networks, such as Friendster (2002), LinkedIn (2003), and Myspace (2003).

Moreover, Kepios analysis shows that the global social media adoption rate has doubled in just the past 8 years.

Just under 30 percent of the world’s population used social media in July 2015, when there were slightly more than 2.5 billion active social media user identities.

We passed the “halfway” point in July 2020, when COVID-19 lockdowns fuelled rapid increases in social media use that pushed the global adoption rate to 50.4 percent.

Current growth rates have slowed considerably compared with the double-digit increases that we saw during 2020 and 2021, but the global adoption rate has still increased by a relative 2.8 percent (+1.6 percentage points) over the past year [remember that the global population has also increased during the past year, which explains why the adoption growth rate doesn’t match the user growth rate].

Looking more closely at recent growth, it’s also worth highlighting that social media user identities have grown faster over the past three months than at any other time since the start of 2022.

The global user total has increased by 71 million identities over the past 90 days (+1.5 percent), meaning that the global figure increased by an average 777,000 users per day between April and June 2023.

And the key takeaway here is that social media growth remains strong, despite overall adoption passing that momentous 60 percent mark.

Social media use still uneven around the world

However, social media use still isn’t evenly distributed around the world.

Adoption rates are highest in Northern and Western Europe, where active social media user identities equate to more than 83 percent of regional populations.

For easier comparison, these figures suggest that roughly 5 in every 6 people living in these regions use social media today.

Meanwhile, the number of active user identities across North America points to an adoption rate that’s closing in on three-quarters of the region’s total population.

Eastern Asia isn’t far behind either, with high social media use across China, Japan, and South Korea pointing to an adoption rate in excess of 70 percent of the total regional population.

However, Eastern Asia is also home to the country with the world’s lowest levels of social media use.

The internet – at least as the rest of the world knows it – is still blocked for everyday citizens in North Korea, which means that only a tiny fraction of the country’s elite can access social media platforms.

Meanwhile, data suggests that just 1 in 11 people across Middle and Eastern Africa use social media today.

And the adoption rate is only marginally better in Western Africa, where data suggest that barely 1 in 7 people used a social platform within the past 30 days. 

But lower levels of social media adoption aren’t confined to countries in Africa.

The latest data indicates that fewer than 1 in 3 people across Southern Asia use social media today, with the adoption rate in Pakistan still languishing below 30 percent.

Women still underrepresented on social media

One of the biggest impacts on social media adoption rates across Southern Asia is a stark gender “gap”, with women only half as likely as men to use social media across the region as a whole.

This digital divide is at its most extreme in Afghanistan, where men account for a massive 84 percent of the country’s social media users.

But a large gender imbalance is clearly evident in Pakistan too, where men account for close to three-quarters of all active social media accounts in July 2023.

Anecdotally, we know that some women in Southern Asia set the gender of their social media profiles to “male” in order to avoid online harassment, and this practice may have a small impact on these gender balance figures.

However, broader internet adoption figures show that many women across Southern Asia are still unable to access the internet, which is by far the greatest contributing factor to this digital gender divide.

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