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Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) Guide

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

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

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) Blog Collection | Meltwater

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

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

Media Monitoring: Guides, Best Practices & Industry Insights

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

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

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

Social Listening Blogs | Category

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

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

Reputation Management Blogs | Category

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

The key to success is branding & brand management!

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

Brand Management Blogs | Category

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

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

Competitive Intelligence Blogs | Category

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

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

Customer Journey Blogs | Category

How do customers interact with my newly launched product?

How do I increase the productivity of my employees?

How do I know if my marketing efforts are working?

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

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

AI & Data Analytics Blogs | Category

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

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

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

Public Relations (PR) Blogs | Category

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

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

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

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

Internal Communications Blogs | Category

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

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

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

Content Marketing Blogs | Category

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

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

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

Influencer Marketing Blogs | Category

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

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

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

Marketing Blogs | Category

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

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

Social Media Marketing Blogs | Category

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

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

Digital Marketing & PR Tools Blogs | Category

From media coverage and social conversations to audience insights and campaign performance, communications teams have access to more data than ever before. But collecting information is only the beginning. The real challenge is knowing what it means, what matters most, and how to respond with confidence.

Data-driven communications turns scattered signals into actionable insights. By using data to understand audiences, identify trends, measure impact, and guide decisions, communications teams can create more relevant strategies and demonstrate their value across the organization.

Learn how data-driven communications helps teams understand audiences, measure impact, identify trends, and turn media, social, and AI signals into action.

Data-Driven Communications: Insights & Strategies | Meltwater

Kim Cattrall takes the lead in a campaign celebrating the intelligence behind confident brand decisions.

Intelligence is always in style: Kim Cattrall stars in Meltwater’s new campaign

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

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

Social media moves fast—churning out data constantly—yet very few spikes deserve your undivided attention. Social and influencer teams face a greater challenge than spotting trends. They must identify which trends actually shape audience behavior, influence conversation, and support their strategy. Finding impactful social media trends requires more than reacting to viral moments.

The right data and structure can make trend detection repeatable and actionable. Social listening and analytics tools enable teams to connect social signals with broader context, which turns raw data into actionable insights. This process results in better timing, clearer direction, and digital marketing strategies built around emerging audience interests. 

Once you understand these dynamics, you can identify the social media trends that lead to direct business impact.

Why Is Trend Analysis Critical for Competitive Positioning?

What Is a Social Media Trend? (And How to Recognize One Early)

Where Should Teams Look to Spot New Trends First?

How to Find Social Media Trends with Meltwater (Step by Step)

How to Apply Trend Insights to Campaigns and Influencer Strategy

How to Choose the Right Tools for Social Media Trend Detection

Turn Social Media Trends into Action with Meltwater

FAQs About How to Find Social Media Trends

Trend analysis shapes when your brand shows up and how it enters the conversation. Spotting meaningful shifts early creates space to influence direction. On the other hand, arriving late often forces brands to compete for attention in crowded feeds, where differentiation disappears and engagement fades.

Early trend insight supports stronger decisions. Teams align messaging with what audiences care about in the moment, build share of voice when interest rises, and avoid rushed pivots that pull strategy off course. Understanding why a topic gains traction makes it easier to decide whether to lead, participate selectively, or step back. These strategic choices carry more weight now that 45% of marketers believe social media is increasingly critical for their overall business success. 

Effective judgment requires moving beyond surface metrics. While conversation volume reflects past activity, competitive advantage stems from monitoring how momentum builds, how sentiment shifts, and how engagement evolves. Meltwater’s Social Listening platform brings those signals together across platforms, providing brands with the context they need to act earlier and with clearer intent.

A social media trend represents a pattern of conversation that builds over time, spreads across audiences or platforms, and influences how people talk, create, or engage. Distinguishing real patterns from short-lived noise helps teams avoid wasted effort and act with intent. Here’s how you can spot the right trends early on:

Viral moments spike fast and fade just as quickly. They often center on a single post, creator, or event, with engagement concentrated in a short window. Trends move differently. They exhibit sustained growth, repeated participation from multiple creators, and variation in how people interpret or use the idea. Instead of a single burst of attention, trends build momentum over days or weeks.

Recognizing this distinction helps your team avoid overreacting. A sharp spike in mentions may look promising, but without sustained follow-through, it rarely supports a long-term social media strategy.

Early signals often emerge before a topic feels obvious. These signals include steady increases in post velocity, repeated creator references to the same idea, trending hashtag or keyword frequency, and subtle shifts in audience sentiment. Engagement patterns also matter, especially when the discussion moves from novelty to genuine interest or debate.

Dashboards that surface keyword spikes and sentiment changes in near-real time make these patterns easier to spot. An effective social media analytics platform like Meltwater highlights emerging movement across platforms so teams can determine whether a conversation shows signs of lasting relevance or has all the markers of short-lived hype.

The renewed interest in tinned fish represents a long-term trend with real growth potential. Over the past few years, Gen Z audiences have transformed the category into a recurring topic across social media, driven by food culture, aesthetics, and creator-led discovery. This shift extends beyond online conversations, with the global tinned fish market set to expand by nearly $8 billion through 2034. 

Brands like Fishwife have leaned into this shift, partnering with food-focused creators such as @savourygirll on Instagram, who shares culinary content with 899k followers. These partnerships allow Fishwife to join the conversation organically and expand reach through trusted creator audiences.

Holly Barnes on Instagram: "let’s eat some tinned fish 🐟💋 @fishwife"

The latest trends rarely appear in one place. They appear in fragments across platforms, communities, and media formats before they feel obvious. Teams that rely on a single channel often spot big trends too late or miss important context that explains why a topic gains traction.

The most reliable approach to trend detection combines multiple sources. Looking across social, creator, and broader media ecosystems helps determine whether a conversation reflects real momentum or isolated buzz. This cross-channel view also reveals how trends spread across audiences, allowing teams to maximize timing and relevance to drive performance.

Public social networks often surface the earliest signals. Platforms like TikTok, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, Reddit, and YouTube reveal changes in tone, frequency, and engagement as ideas begin to circulate. Instead of focusing on individual posts or reels, track patterns. Repeated language, similar formats, and consistent engagement growth usually signal a trend worth watching.

Creators often experiment before brands do. When multiple creators interpret the same idea differently, it can signal early adoption. This activity demonstrates a trend’s flexibility and its ability to support different narratives, formats, or audiences.

Nat Miletic, founder of Clio Websites, builds a strong following on X and LinkedIn by leveraging market trends. He spots trends by looking past the creator’s post and diving directly into the comments. 

“Trends aren't just about what influencers say; they are about how the community reacts as well. If multiple creators in the tech and SEO space are experimenting with a new format and their audience is responding with high-intent questions, reposts, and engagement, rather than just passive likes, we recognize that as a shift in market sentiment.”

Track online news and community conversations for context

Editorial coverage, forums, and niche communities or social networks provide essential context. News articles, blog posts, memes, and community discussions often explain why a topic matters, rather than merely reflecting that it’s trending. This perspective helps teams identify the forces driving the conversation and decide whether the trend aligns with their goals.

For example, NASCAR combines social signals with editorial coverage to understand where its stories resonate and how narratives evolve around major announcements, landmark events, and partnerships. By analyzing earned media, sentiment, and message pull-through together using Meltwater, the communications team spots momentum early and decides where to amplify the conversation.

Together, these sources create a clearer picture. Cross-checking signals across channels reduces guesswork and helps teams act with confidence rather than react to surface-level spikes.

Finding trends consistently requires structure. Instead of monitoring everything at once, teams need a repeatable process that filters noise, validates momentum, and supports collaboration. Centralized listening and analytics create a practical advantage and provide the necessary visibility.

Step 1: Define goals and choose the right listening filters

Social listening tools dashboard displaying share of voice, media exposure trends, and real-time social mentions

Success begins with clarity. Identify what you want to learn and why the data matters. Strategic objectives can span brand relevance, category shifts, competitor movement, and creator behavior. From there, narrow your focus using topics, keywords, geographies, and languages that reflect your audience and business priorities. Meltwater’s AI-powered insights surface the right conversations and simplify dashboards for validation and activation. 

Step 2: Track keywords, hashtags, and sentiment shifts

Social listening dashboard showing keyword search for electric vehicles with share of voice and mentions trends charts 

Once monitoring is in place, look beyond raw volume. Pay attention to how quickly conversations grow, which terms appear together, and whether sentiment changes over time. Early trend signals, like a new hashtag, often show steady acceleration rather than sudden spikes. Shifts in tone can also signify when a topic moves from curiosity to stronger engagement. When you search on Meltwater, you find keywords with actionable data and historical context for you and your team—all critical for effective trendspotting.

Step 3: Validate and prioritize emerging signals

Not every pattern earns action. Validation separates real momentum from temporary noise and clarifies when to move forward. Compare growth across social media platforms on Meltwater, evaluate repeat participation from different creators or communities, and check whether engagement remains consistent. Prioritization becomes easier when trends show sustained movement and clear relevance to your audience.

Trend insights gain value when you share them with other team members. Content, communications, and influencer teams often examine the same signal from different angles. Shared dashboards and automated reporting help stakeholders align on key metrics, agree on next steps, and trigger action before momentum peaks. Meltwater supports and simplifies this collaboration by bringing trend data, context, and social media insights into one centralized hub.

To find these trends for your brand, try Meltwater's free product tour.  

Trend insight delivers value only when it informs your next steps. Once a signal clears validation, the focus moves from detection to execution. An effective strategy translates early movement into timely, relevant decisions that align with your brand.

Translate trend report findings into actionable ideas

Strong trends provide direction, not instructions. Examine how people frame the conversation, which formats gain traction, and what emotions or questions show up most. These cues can shape creative angles, messaging themes, and content formats without copying existing posts. The most effective campaigns position social trends as context, not templates.

Inform content calendars, influencer partnerships, or campaign timing

Trend data guides planning decisions by moving beyond pure observation. A rising topic signals when to accelerate a campaign, adjust posting cadence, or test new formats. Influencer strategy evolves in the same way. When creators already engage with a trend organically, partnerships feel more natural, credible, and trustworthy. Timing matters most here. Acting while interest builds gives campaigns room to perform before the topic reaches saturation.

Applying trend insights this way keeps campaigns grounded in real audience behavior while preserving brand consistency. Instead of reacting after a trend peaks, teams plan, collaborate, and execute with intention.

The tools you select will impact how early you see trends and how confidently you act on them. While manual methods surface ideas, they rarely provide the consistency or context teams require to execute strategic decisions at scale. Trendspotting requires technology that bridges the gap between raw data and actionable intelligence:

Effective trend detection tools share core capabilities. Real-time coverage helps teams spot momentum early. Accurate sentiment analysis adds nuance, revealing how people feel rather than simply measuring how often they post. Influencer and creator visibility identifies the voices driving adoption, while geo-filtering helps teams map where trends come from and how they spread. Alerts and dashboards round this out by converting signals into shareable, easy-to-track insights.

Manual methods vs. integrated intelligence platforms

Manual monitoring, while good for inspiration, stretches thin during high-volume periods. Switching between platforms, tracking trends in spreadsheets, or relying on instinct fragments insights and makes it harder to validate signals and align teams. Integrated intelligence platforms eliminate that friction by centralizing social, media, and influencer data in one place. This approach accelerates validation, improves collaboration, and facilitates ongoing optimization as trends evolve.

Choosing the right tools shifts teams from reactive monitoring to proactive decision-making, transforming trend detection into a repeatable advantage rather than a one-off effort.

Dashboard visuals showing social posts, sentiment trends, and hashtag analysis across social networks

Spotting trends early creates opportunity, but acting on them is what drives impact. Teams need more than visibility into what’s trending. They need context, confidence, and a clear path from insight to execution.

Meltwater brings social listening, analytics, research, and influencer intelligence together so teams can identify emerging trends, validate momentum, and align faster across campaigns. By transforming fragmented signals into clear insight, brands can make smarter timing decisions, stay relevant as conversations evolve, and avoid reacting after competitors set the tone.

Turn real-time trend insights into impact. Book a Meltwater demo to see how AI-powered listening helps brands spot what’s next before it becomes obvious.

Here are the most common questions about social media trends.

How can businesses identify which social media trends are most relevant to their industry or audience?

Comparing trend signals against historical performance clarifies fit. When a topic attracts sustained engagement from the right audience segments and aligns with existing brand conversations, it likely supports meaningful results instead of short-term visibility.

Can following local or regional social media trends improve results for businesses with targeted demographics?

Yes, brands with a geographic focus benefit tremendously. Local and regional social media trends often reflect cultural moments, events, or issues that national conversations frequently miss. Tracking location-based keywords, regional creators, and local sentiment reveals opportunities to engage more authentically. These insights help teams tailor messaging, timing, and creative to specific markets, improving relevance and increasing engagement within those communities.

How do businesses measure the real impact of trending topics on their social media ROI?

Businesses should monitor performance fluctuations before, during, and after a trend appears—including engagement quality, follower growth, traffic, and conversions. Benchmarking trend-driven content against baseline performance isolates specific impact. Long-term indicators, such as sustained audience growth and improved sentiment, often deliver greater value compared to short-lived spikes in reach.

How to Find Social Media Trends That Drive Strategy

Maintaining a strong public image takes a lot of work. Public relations experts need to capitalize on every opportunity to make their case. Knowing where these opportunities are at all times can help PR pros send the right messages at the right times.

Let’s explore the role of AI in PR and the best AI tools for PR that can help you spread the word.

Top Use Cases of AI Tools for Public Relations Professionals

Choosing the Right Al Tools for Your PR Needs

Public relations has many moving parts, from crafting narratives to analyzing data to engaging with audiences. AI can play a role in all of these. 

AI-driven analytics can also offer deeper insights into how audiences think and act. Technology is bringing us closer to laser-precision messaging. Companies need straightforward ways to tell people what they need to hear at key times, making their PR efforts more effective. 

When you create relevant messages that your audience cares about, you stand to build stronger connections and trust — two cornerstones of an effective PR strategy. With resources increasingly tight and no shortage of competition, AI content creation tools can provide a strategic advantage.

AI tools can make it a lot easier, and more cost effective, to translate various assets, add captions to video, and more. This simple accessibility step brings your company closer to more audiences, allowing interest to grow.

Machine learning algorithms can help PRs sift through large amounts of data quickly, and AI can provide summaries of the data, providing context to help you strategize your next PR move. AI can also be used to summarize internal pieces of content for PR promotion — extracting key points for highlighting to journalists.

Emerging trends and changes in sentiment are often buried in data, so having a real-time way to find these insights and be alerted when changes occur can help PRs stay proactive rather than reactive. 

AI can help streamline your media outreach process by making it easier to personalize and customizing pitches based on a journalists' particular beat, curating media lists, and helping optimize pitch timing. 

TIP: Download our Data-Driven PR Playbook to learn more about AI tools and strategies to help your PR team work smarter.

The best AI tools for PR are subjective, based on your needs and how you prefer to work. This shortlist of tools for PR can give you a jumping-off point as you explore new ways to add AI to your public relations strategy.

Meltwater gives you an all-in-one AI-driven PR platform. It caters to all aspects of the PR machine, from finding journalists, tracking brand awareness, to developing a PR strategy based on sentiment, share of voice, and other data.

Real-time alerts: Be alerted to mentions spikes and get immediate AI-powered analysis and overviews

Sentiment analysis: Get the deeper meaning behind what's driving consumer sentiment

AI-driven summaries: Understand conversation origins, commonalities, and anomalies

GenAI Lens: Gain visibility into how your organization is represented in LLM models

Get in touch to watch a product demo and find out more!

Teams looking for an all-in-one solution that increases efficiency, provides deeper insights and analysis, and the ability to easily share results with stakeholders in newsletters and real-time updated dashboards.

The Meltwater media relations platform lets you be everywhere your audience is, online and offline. Users can access the largest media database of podcasts, publications, reporters, bloggers, and other contacts to help you get the word out. 

Social listening lets you be part of more conversations online, discover trending topics before they blow up, find relevant hashtags, identify potential influencer partners, and even see your status in LLM results.

Released in 2025, Meltwater's GenAI Lens helps you better manage your reputation by allowing you to quickly spot and address inaccuracies in how major LLM models represent your brand or products. It also helps you track sentiment, narrative trend, and competitive positioning over time to inform more targeted PR, media outreach, and content strategies grounded in AI-world intelligence.

GenAI Lens - Your brand, shown through the lens of AI

But none of this data matters if you can’t make quick sense of it. That’s where AI shines brightest, boiling down insights into easy-to-read, easy-to-understand statements. It analyzes the data in human terms, so even if you’re not a data analyst, you’ll know what the data says, why it matters, and what to do next. Mira, the Meltwater AI assistant for PR teams can provide instant PR insights by surfacing trends, monitor brand impact, and respond to media shifts in real time.

Want to see Meltwater's AI-powered PR solutions in action? Click here and fill out the form below to schedule a personalized demo!

"What we value most about Meltwater is its ability to give us a comprehensive, real-time view of our media presence. Their platform allows us to easily track earned media mentions, monitor key conversations through customized keyword searches and social listening, and distribute press releases directly to targeted journalists. The ability to export clear, usable data for campaign, event, and reporting purposes is a major asset for our communications work." (Source)

"There are frequent updates which in one way is good but it also makes you have to relearn where things are." (Source)

Otter.ai is an AI-powered transcription service that can quickly turn any recording into a transcript. PRs can use Otter.ai to transcribe webinars, Zoom meetings, executive calls, and recordings of press conferences or interviews into written text. 

Learns custom vocabulary: save time by training Otter.ai on specific terminology

Calendar connect: schedule meetings for easier collaboration

Real-time transcription: differentiate between different speakers and get useful timestamps for easier reading

Otter.ai offers four different plans that can be billed monthly or annually: Basic (Free), Pro ($16.99/mo), Business ($30/mo), and Enterprise (Custom pricing)

Otter.ai is a powerful tool for PR pros who need to optimize and streamline their daily workflow, saving time during the content development stage means you can publish more content faster and with greater accuracy.  

They process makes it easier to repurpose your content, such as turning a recording into a blog post or press release. Transcripts also make your content more accessible, helping you reach people who prefer to read vs. audio or video content. 

"Otter allows me to not only be in two places at once, it allows me to share parts of discussions, trend issue, and enable a better service delivered to my end-customers. Rarely has a platform fundamentally changed the way I work - Otter.ai has. I have over 2 years of archived customer discussions I can reference and use in myriad ways." (Source)

"If you deny the bot access to a meeting, it still keeps trying to join for a while, which can be distracting. Also, it shows generic labels like Speaker 1 and Speaker 2 instead of recognizing actual names from the meeting, even when the names are visible in the chat or participant list. Adding that capability would make the summaries more readable and personal." (Source)

ChatGPT is one of the most accessible and widely used AI tools for PR. Developed by OpenAI, this language model generates human-like text in seconds based on simple user prompts. 

Free to use: free version is comprehensive and easy to get started with 

Intuitive: low learning curve makes it easy to quickly get up to speed

Easily customizable: train GPTs on your tone of voice and customize how it interacts with you

Upload files: easy file upload which can help train ChatGPT as well as enable summarization, extracting key points, and more

ChatGPT is free to use, but there are paid versions available

Writing first drafts of blog posts and press releases

Drafting appropriate responses in specific crises

Rewriting content to appeal to specific demographics or audiences

ChatGPT offers flexibility in how you use it. For example, you can upload documents or files and ask ChatGPT to draft content, summarize information, or ask questions about data. You can also create your own knowledge bases for your PR team using ChatGPT by uploading your own resources.

And if you don’t mind springing for the paid version, you can access tools like DALL-E to create your own images.

Tip: Download our Data-Driven PR Toolkit for templates and other resources to drive productivity, including ChatGPT prompts specifically for PR pros.

PR professionals need to be everywhere all at once, and tapping into AI solutions lets them do just that. Learn what the best AI tools PR are, what users like about them, key features and more. 

Get our free eBook: A Simple Guide to AI in PR 

Best AI Tools for Public Relations: Complete 2026 Guide

When it comes to brand building, many food and beverage companies face the unique challenges in selling consumable products. Unlike reusable or multi-use products, wrappers get trashed, cups get recycled, and food gets eaten, reducing the amount of time available to create emotional connections and build exposure. That’s one reason some F&B brands start offering something with a bit more staying power: branded merchandise.
Merch is a way for food and beverage brands to nurture loyalty between moments of consumption. And while the concept of F&B swag isn’t new, Starbucks and Trader Joe’s achieved notable virality with each of theirs in 2025. Together, the tale of two merch lines — the Starbucks Bearista Cold Cups and the Trader Joe’s Canvas Tote Bags — can offer lessons for marketers about building excitement around brands. 

So, what can these viral merch moments of 2025 teach us about building brand affinity in the years ahead? We used Explore+ — Meltwater’s enterprise-grade media, social, and consumer intelligence solution — to find out.

The Meltwater Blog

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Best AI Tools for Public Relations: Complete 2026 Guide

Viral Food & Beverage Merch: Lessons from Trader Joe’s & Starbucks

The Importance of Earned Media for GEO

Top AI Marketing Tools to Automate & Optimize Your Strategy

Best LLM Tracking Tools for Marketing Teams (2026 Guide)

What Is a PR Coverage Report? Guide & Best Practices

Authenticity is the new brand currency

Narrative warfare: How AI is forcing a reset in corporate communications

10 Ways to Increase the Visibility of Your Online Content

What Is Brand Governance? Key Principles & Best Practices

What Is Corporate PR? Strategy & Best Practices Guide