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

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

Today, PR teams aren’t just tracking media coverage and share of voice. They’re also measuring how their brand shows up in AI-generated answers, search summaries, and large language models (LLMs). This new LLM visibility layer is quickly becoming a critical part of PR performance.

15 Must-Have PR KPIs and How to Track Them

See how one platform can power every decision across PR, communications, and marketing.

The Meltwater Blog

Blog Topics: Generative Engine Optimization, Media Intelligence, Media Relations, Social Listening, Consumer Intelligence, Influencer Marketing

Find out how you can leverage Facebook to boost your brand's online presence and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

Facebook Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage Instagram to boost your brand's visual appeal and gain a competitive edge. Explore our category page today!

Instagram Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage LinkedIN to grow your professional network and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

LinkedIn Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage TikTok to elevate your brand with creative content and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

TikTok Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage X / Twitter to engage your audience effectively and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

X / Twitter Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage YouTube to create engaging video content and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

YouTube Blog | Meltwater

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

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

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) Blog Collection | Meltwater

Every day billions of conversations take place on social media: tweets, posts, comments, blogs, reviews, podcasts, and much more.
Learn how to use social listening to make sense of all of that data.

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

Social Listening Blogs | Category

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

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

Reputation Management Blogs | Category

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

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

Brand Management Blogs | Category

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

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

Competitive Intelligence Blogs | Category

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

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

Customer Journey Blogs | Category

What Is Data Analytics? [Beginner’s Guide 2023]
How can I grow my business? 
How do customers interact with my newly launched product?
How do I increase the productivity of my employees?
How do I know if my marketing efforts are working?
We have just two words for you...Data analytics!

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

AI & Data Analytics Blogs | Category

Public relations and media relations can add impact to any marketing strategy. It’s an opportunity for brands to grow their reach beyond traditional sales messages. PR helps to shape the image you want people to have of your brand.
So, what is PR and how do you use it? This guide shows you everything you need to know to build a strong public relations foundation.

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

Public Relations (PR) Blogs | Category

We all know exactly what the roles of sales or accounting are in a company, right? We might even have a slight idea of what the IT guys are doing.
But there is another business discipline, that plays a crucial role in organizations, even more so during the pandemic – internal communications!
But what exactly do we mean by that, what purpose does it serve and what steps can you take to ensure you and your employees will communicate effectively?

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

Internal Communications Blogs | Category

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

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

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

Content Marketing Blogs | Category

The rise of the influencer marketing space – today a $10 billion industry, growing 50% per year – is one of the clearest examples of how social media is transforming traditional marketing. These days having a business website, presence on social, PR coverage, and your own content isn’t enough to compete.
We'll dive into the intricacies of influencer marketing to help ensure that you're equipped with the insights needed to be successful in this space.

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

Influencer Marketing Blogs | Category

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

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

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

Marketing Blogs | Category

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

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

Social Media Management Blogs | Category

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

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

Social Media Marketing Blogs | Category

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

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

Digital Marketing & PR Tools Blogs | Category

The media impacts virtually everyone. From news stories to social media platforms, what we see in the media helps to shape our views of the world. Even if you’re not a big consumer of media, the people around you might be. And media’s influence on their beliefs, ideas, decision-making, and conversations can make its way to you in your face-to-face interactions.

How exactly does media impact us? And what effect does it have on your business or brand? That’s where a media impact data analysis comes in handy. Here’s what media impact means for businesses, along with tips on how to measure it.

Why Is Media Impact Analysis Important for Businesses?

Let’s start with a definition: Media impact is the effect certain stories or mentions in the media have on audiences. This effect includes consumer sentiment, the perceived value of a product, and even product sales.

Impact also goes beyond whether the beliefs, ideas, or attitudes of individuals have been affected. We can look at impact on a more “macro” level to see how entire organizations, companies, or institutions have generated systematic changes.

The media (and journalism in general) is designed to have an effect on its audience. It’s supposed to inform the public, but it can also shape our perceptions of issues and events. When it’s your business being featured by news organizations, you need to understand the impact your media appearance has on the public and how it will ultimately affect your brand.

If impact is the byproduct of mass communication, then a media impact analysis is the act of understanding that byproduct. By definition, it’s the formal assessment of the media’s impact on an audience, business, or brand.

Getting mentioned by media organizations is an impressive feat. But brands shouldn’t stop there. They need to take the next step to understand what this publicity means for them, for better or for worse.

Some questions a media impact analysis might ask and answer are:

Did publicity directly influence sales and revenue increases?

Did the media coverage increase traffic to my website?

Did media coverage ultimately change how consumers feel about my brand or company?

Have I taken any business away from my direct competitors?

Has the mass media generated greater customer loyalty?

This isn’t an exhaustive list by any means. But it does demonstrate the scope and depth of a media impact analysis and how it can give you a better understanding of whether or not your advertising and PR are working.

Picture this: You spend $10,000 on a marketing campaign for your food security non-profit. Several news outlets and digital media publish the story about your new initiative to feed local communities. You track clicks from each source, see spikes in website traffic, and notice an uptick in donations to fund your project — all helpful quantitative data. But many dots still need to be connected.

Tip: Learn more about the Meltwater AI Spike Analysis feature!

For instance, all the activity you’re seeing now could be the direct result of your campaign and will cease as soon as your campaign ends. There may be no ongoing conversations about reducing food insecurity, no systemic changes, or no action taken by local governments to address the cause in other ways. Public opinion might remain stagnant.

If your goal was to create a larger conversation around hunger, a media impact analysis can help you see how you’re moving the needle. It adds in-depth context to quantitative data so you can see where your numbers are coming from and why they matter.

Media impact analyses work for for-profit businesses, too. Take Google, for instance. Meltwater enables Google to make sense of conversations beyond basic social analytics. It looks at consumer sentiment (the meaning behind the message) to understand the company's global footprint. It helps Google understand how campaigns perform in relation to each other, assess whether they reached key demographics, and dissect the relationship between the data they collect and their product objectives.

Making an impact that emphasizes a deep-rooted change in sentiment and social norms can be a long, slow process. Changes aren’t always immediately apparent. But tracking conversations over time can show you the overall impact of your media at every level — local, regional, national, and even international.

Historically, media impact has been measured through lab studies. Doing so through other channels has proved challenging due to potential selection bias. Today’s technology enables a better path to analysis with artificial intelligence tools like natural language processing and machine learning or image recognition software. It eliminates the risks of selection bias because it takes into account everyone in the new media ecosystem.

AI collects and analyzes millions of data points in real-time and turns them into usable insights. A similar feat would typically take entire teams of human analysts and countless weeks or months to produce somewhat similar outcomes.

Here's what a modern media impact analysis looks like:

We’re advocates of starting with the end in mind and working backward. When you know the impact you’d like to make, you can better tailor your content and campaigns to produce the desired outcome.

Having an impact goal gives you something to compare the results of your campaign to. Later, when you start analyzing the conversations people are having based on your campaign, you can see whether those conversations align with your original intentions.

There are many ways you can measure media effects. Some of the most common metrics include:

Stanford Social Innovation Review reminds us that there’s no guarantee that a story that reached millions of readers will have a greater, real-world impact than one that reached thousands of readers. Clicks also only tell part of a story, especially since bots can be deployed to increase clicks and make it look like your content is getting traction.

Rather, reach isn’t so much about the size of the audience as it is about the substance of the audience. One way to get a better idea of reach is to look at how long a person engaged with your content. Someone who spent more time reading an article is likely to be more impacted by it than someone who bounced after a few seconds.

AI can help fill in the knowledge gaps by looking beyond clicks and getting a better idea of how people felt about your content.

Media can play a powerful role in shaping individual attitudes, thoughts, and opinions. And in some cases, it can shape the public’s perceptions as a whole. Media coverage can influence how other individuals and organizations approach certain issues.

Measuring the influence of your content is a big part of impact analysis. AI reduces the need to collect influence-related data through focus groups and interviews by analyzing online conversations and the context behind them.

When combined with other metrics, organizations can get a better sense of just how influential their content is to their audience and their own goals.

Social media marketing tends to emphasize vanity metrics such as likes, shares, and follows. These are often mistaken for engagement.

In reality, they mean very little in the grand scheme of things because they don’t indicate any level of commitment or understanding.

However, AI technology can bring more insights to engagement activities through social media listening and social media monitoring. Discover what else people are talking about on social networks beyond your brand. Learn what’s driving conversations, discover relevant topics, and become a more impactful part of your audiences’ lives.

Website traffic is a big part of engagement. It demonstrates that your content wasn’t just enticing to read, but it also encouraged the reader to take additional action. AI can bring greater context to traffic by showing you exactly what sources your traffic is coming from and which content drove the action.

3. Deploy a media monitoring and analysis solution

Media monitoring platforms like Meltwater do a lot of the heavy lifting for you when you're conducting a media impact analysis. Once you deploy your solution, AI tools go to work discovering and analyzing conversations, tracking metrics like the ones listed above, and turning information into insights.

From there, it’s a matter of looking at each resource and report with spelled-out data so you can get a better understanding of your impact.

At Meltwater, we have conducted several media analyses to serve as examples for you. Take a look at the following blogs to understand how it works and how it could look like:

The Oscars 2024: A Social Listening Analysis

Sponsorship Analysis Example: Springboks x Rugby World Cup 2023

Barbie vs. Oppenheimer: Which Movie Is Making the Biggest Social Media Impact?

Who Won Summer 2023? Barbie vs. Beyoncé vs. Taylor Swift

Game of Thrones: Season 8 Buzz on Social Media

Game of Thrones: Social Media Reactions to the Series Finale

The Battle for the White House on Social Media

Women’s World Cup 2019: Social Media Analysis

Understanding the impact of your public relations, media use, and media mentions is a critical step in any PR strategy. It removes any guesswork of whether you’re making a difference, both in your company and in the lives of your audience.

Our media monitoring and social media management platforms put AI to work in continuously generating these insights on your behalf - for example by using image recognition. We scour more than 270,000 global new sources and bring in more than 500 million pieces of content to our clients every day. Get a deeper understanding of your audience, track topics that matter, and watch your impact evolve over time.

Schedule a demo to see how we can simplify your media initiatives.

How to Conduct a Media Impact Analysis

The two most-anticipated movies of the summer come out on the same day — and they couldn’t be more different. Yet social media is abuzz about both of them in the lead-up to their debut in theaters on July 21. 

Barbie, starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, follows the iconic doll and her longtime boyfriend, Ken, as they leave the toy world and enter the real one. On the other hand, Oppenheimer, starring Cillian Murphy and Emily Blunt, tells the true story of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer as he develops the atomic bomb during World War II. 

The digital realm is filled with chatter about both movies, but how are Barbie and Oppenheimer conversations measuring up against each other? We used our consumer intelligence platform to find out. 

Reading Tips: Who Won Summer 2023? Barbie vs. Beyoncé vs. Taylor Swift, The Oscars 2024: A Social Listening Analysis

While posts and reposts about Barbie and Oppenheimer were relatively equal at the beginning of 2023, that all started to change in March, shortly before the first look of the Barbie movie was released. Since then, the volume of posts about Barbie has skyrocketed beyond those about Oppenheimer, which have dipped slightly since June. 

In total, there have been nearly 7 million social media posts about Barbie this year, reaching a potential audience of nearly 9.5 billion people and garnering more than 277 million engagement actions.

Barbie is also dominating the conversation when it comes to engagement actions, such as likes and shares. About 89% of all engagement actions in these conversations have been on posts about the Mattel doll-focused film.

Meltwater's consumer intelligence platform also shows us who has been drumming up the most buzz about each film. Margot Robbie, who plays Barbie, is certifiably the star of the summer. She has been mentioned in more than 410,000 posts in total, eclipsing mentions of her co-star Ryan Gosling (248,000 posts), who plays Ken, and director Greta Gerwig (189,000 posts). 

Meanwhile, Cillian Murphy, who plays J. Robert Oppenheimer, has racked up the most posts of his cast at about 63,000. That’s definitely a significant number, but it’s still no match for Barbie’s biggest names. 

But where are these posters located? For both Oppenheimer and Barbie, the vast majority of posts and reposts are coming from authors based in the United States. Notably, posts about Barbie are more distributed across other countries, with Brazil generating the second-highest volume of posts, followed by the United Kingdom and Sri Lanka. For Oppenheimer, almost 50% of posts are coming from the United States, while 2.7%, the second-highest volume, are originating in the United Kingdom.

Part of Barbie’s long history is that she was almost exclusively marketed to girls — that gender skew is reflected in the author demographics of social media posts about the Barbie movie. Many more women are posting about Barbie than men, 58% of whom are between the ages of 18 and 24. 

On the flip side, a higher proportion of men than women are posting about Oppenheimer, with 52.7% of them being between the ages of 18 to 24. And while both films are generating some buzz with the 25 to 34 age group, a higher proportion of authors ages 35 and up are posting about Oppenheimer than Barbie.

When it comes to sentiment, about 40% of posts about Barbie are positive compared to 7.5% of negative ones. Sentiment about Oppenheimer, which covers much graver subject matter, is understandably more mixed. About 27% of posts are positive compared to about 12% of negative ones.

Tip: Learn more about The What, Why And How of Sentiment Analysis and about Sentiment Analysis API

In the end, both Barbie and Oppenheimer are drawing the kind of attention any movie maker dreams about. But, as the consumer intelligence data shows, it is undeniably a blockbuster Barbie summer. 

Learn more about how Meltwater's consumer intelligence platform can help you understand what drives your audience — get a free demo by filling out the form below.

From changing digital payment habits to bank mergers and acquisitions, there has been plenty to discuss in the banking and financial services sector so far this year. While finance-related conversations are thriving in the digital world, some platforms are seeing more money mentions than others. We used our social listening platform to measure mentions of banking and financial services keywords across 10 sources from the first half of 2023. Here is where finance keyword mentions have decreased and increased.

Tip: Get more finance industry insights in our sector report: 2023 Industry Snapshot: Banking and Financial Services. 

Of the 10 sources we analyzed, finance and banking keyword mentions only fell on Pinterest and blogs.

Volume change compared to previous period: -19% (-880K mentions)

On social blogs, the 2023 finance conversation has been on the decline. This may be due to other sources drawing bigger audiences in previous months. Some of the top blogs that had the most mentions answered common banking and finance questions and provided timely market updates and analysis. [Note: This analysis looked at blog mentions from January 1 through May 31, 2023, due to changes in how we index Wordpress blogs. All other insights in this blog are based on data from January 1 through June 30, 2023.]

Volume change compared to previous period: -1% (-2K mentions)

Though finance mentions on Pinterest lagged slightly in February and March, the conversation began rebounding in May. Some of the most engaging content on the platform was about saving money.

Mentions of finance keywords increased across Twitch, podcasts, forums, Reddit, broadcast, news, and Twitter. Each of those conversations had significant spikes in March, during the collapses of multiple U.S. banks.

Volume change compared to previous period: +37% (+5.4M mentions)

Finance conversations boomed on Twitter during the March bank collapses, but one of the most engaged Tweets was a joke. In it, the Tweeter says they reached “financial freedom” via “liquidating assets” by buying iced coffees, sodas, and smoothies every day. It racked up 29.4K retweets and 158.9K likes.  

Volume change compared to previous period: +21% (+450K mentions)

Broadcast news coverage in 2023 spiked on March 13, 16, and 20 and May 1, each corresponding with news breaks about the collapses of Signature Bank, Silicon Valley Bank, Credit Suisse, and First Republic Bank. 

Volume change compared to previous period: +24% (+162 mentions)

There was also a tiny increase in finance mentions on Twitch, known primarily for video game content. The livestream platform has a very niche community of stock market and crypto enthusiasts.

Volume change compared to previous period: +18% (+11.3K mentions)

Finance talk on podcasts is rising slightly, likely related to more popular news podcasts covering this year’s prominent finance stories. Notably, one of the podcast episodes that had the biggest impact was The Ramsey Show’s April 4 episode “Do I Need a Credit Card for International Travel? (Hour 2),” which reached 242 million listeners. 

Tip: Take a look at the best finance podcasts to listen to.

Volume change compared to previous period: +16% (+1.7M mentions)

As with broadcast news coverage, finance mentions in news sources grew, spiking along with major news breaks during the spring banking crisis. One of the finance-focused news articles that had the biggest impact on social media was Ghanian outlet Starrfm Online’s piece “Standard Bank, PAPSS partner to enhance cross-border payment across Africa”. Its Social Echo — meaning the number of times it was shared, commented on, and reacted to on social media — was 773K. 

Tip: Check out our finance industry report for more data on digital payment methods. 

Volume change compared to previous period: +9% (+180K mentions)

As they did on forums, people looking to chat finance converged on Reddit in March. The top five subreddits for finance mentions were: 

r/wallstreetbets (84,800 mentions from 14 million members)

r/personalfinance (63,500 mentions from 17.9 million members)

r/Superstonk (56,200 mentions from 885,000 members)

r/PersonalFinanceCanada (41,300 mentions from 1.2 million members)

r/AskReddit (33,400 mentions from 41.7 million members)

Tip: Learn more about finance conversations on Reddit in our finance sector report. 

Volume change compared to previous period: +2% (+30K mentions)

Forums grew as a site for finance conversations during the spring banking crisis. The top forum, with 229K mentions, was tickerreport.com.

From sharing saving advice to commenting on industry upheavals, finance conversations are alive and well, offering a wealth of insights into consumer opinions, perceptions, and behaviors. Learn more about how banking and financial services organizations can use media and social intelligence to uncover rising trends and opportunities in our sector report 2023 Industry Snapshot: Banking and Financial Services. 

Global finance conversations in 2023 (so far)

At the time of writing, Meta’s latest social media platform, Threads, has been live for barely two days, but it’s already making a big impact. Having spent a little time with the new platform and absorbing the industry reaction, we’ll share our first impressions in this post. 

Meta Threads is a micro-blogging platform focused on short text posts, limited to 500 characters, and also allows users to add photos or videos to their posts. Threads was created by Meta, which already runs Facebook and Instagram, and at the moment you need an Instagram account in order to create a Threads account.

From the perspective of building a successful new platform, being a part of Meta is a clear advantage. Apart from the obvious benefit of having access to a lot of people with deep expertise in building and running large-scale social platforms, Meta was able to encourage a large number of existing Instagram users to set up Threads accounts very quickly.

Social platforms are reliant on the “network effect” which means the more users they have, the more useful they are. A brand new social network with few users isn’t much fun, and it’s usually a struggle to build up a large enough user base for that platform to reach the point where it becomes useful, so many of the early users abandon it long before it reaches that point.

Threads is reported to have achieved 30 million users within its first day, and industry commentators claim that it exceeded 70 million by the end of the second day, although how many of them will become active regular users remains to be seen.

The overall impression of the user experience on Meta Threads is that it’s a well-designed app built by people who know what they're doing. But at the same time a few important things are missing which, hopefully, will be added in a carefully considered way in the near future. 

The basic functionality is all in place, and it all works more or less how you would expect it to, without any of the clunkiness that puts people off Mastodon. Users can follow each other, share and reply to posts, @mention other users, and set their accounts to public or private. 

Getting started is straightforward, as Threads can simply import all of your profile information across from Instagram, although, of course, a lot of people will want to change this so that their Threads identity is distinct from Instagram. Finding your way around the app is easy, as is posting content, editing your profile, finding people to follow, and searching for content. There’s even a handy “Share Profile” button, should you want to let friends on other platforms know where they can find you. 

So what’s missing? For many users, the biggest issue with Threads is that there’s no chronological timeline of posts from people you follow. Currently, your timeline is a mix of people you follow and content recommended by the algorithm, and it’s not in chronological order.

Our guess is that this was most likely done so that new users would not be faced with an empty timeline on signup, and it will only be a short-lived measure. Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram, has stated that “Both Instagram and Facebook have chronological feeds options, so yes, we’re going to bring one to Threads too.”

The next biggest omission for a lot of people is the lack of both hashtags and trending topics, which would enable users to track and participate in the kind of zeitgeisty conversations that are so popular on other micro-blogging platforms. But bear in mind that the platform is barely two days old, and Meta spokespeople have been keen to point out that users should expect new features to be added in the future. 

Meta has a lot of experience in carefully testing and tweaking new features on Facebook and Instagram, so it’s likely that the company will use the same cautious approach to building out the Threads user experience.

Building a big enough user base to get Threads through its early days while it finds its place in the world will be critical. It needs to be a great experience from day one, even if a few key features are missing. 

Mark Zuckerberg said that Threads had 30 million sign-ups on day one, and others reported over 70 million by day two, which is a great start. What’s even more important, however, is that a huge number of popular brands, media outlets, and influencers all got on board very quickly too. There was clearly a big appetite for this platform.

What this means is that new users are more likely to find something of interest to them when they set up a Threads account, and that’s important for keeping them engaged and actively using the app as it develops. For anybody who spent the past couple of days on Threads, there was a fun, excitable atmosphere as one big name after another joined the app and posted their entertaining first threads. 

It’s clear that many brands are already serious about building a presence on Threads, which seems promising, but spare a thought for the social media managers having to handle all of this. Right now, there are none of the tools that other platforms offer to make life easier for them, so pretty much all they can do is post content natively through the app. 

These are some of the things currently missing that social media managers will want to see soon:

A publicly available API to integrate Threads into social media management tools

Some kind of web app to access Threads from the desktop instead of just mobile

The ability to schedule posts - right now you can only post immediately

Social media analytics tools to track performance

The fact that adverts aren’t running on Threads yet is a good indication that, at this point, Meta is focused on building the platform and growing the community rather than commercializing it. That, however, is almost certain to be part of the long-term plan since Meta is a listed company and has shareholders to answer to.

The company has robust APIs and analytics for Facebook and Instagram, so it’s reasonable to assume that the same will eventually be true for Threads, but the timeline is as yet unknown.

If your brand already has Twitter and Instagram profiles, then Meta Threads is a no-brainer, as you’ll be able to easily repurpose content for the new platform. Based on its early success, there’s a reasonable chance that Threads will grow into a popular social channel in the long term, so it can’t hurt to start building your brand presence there now.

Now is also a good time to do a “vibe check” on Threads, to figure out what the mood feels like there and understand the best tone to use as the community evolves. As an early adopter, you’d also have a unique opportunity to help drive the community and establish the norms for how people use it in the future.

For the reasons outlined above, some extra work will be required since you can only post to Threads natively, and any performance metrics will need to be done manually. Bear in mind that there’s no kind of reach metric currently available in the app, so you’ll only be able to track engagement by counting likes, comments, and shares.

It’s worth noting that as part of the Meta ecosystem, brand safety is likely to be high. The company has a strong moderation system in place with clear rules about what content and behavior is acceptable, so brands can be reasonably confident that it’s a safe channel for them to be visible in.

Meta's Threads: Our First Impressions

At Meltwater we’re always exploring new ways to integrate AI into our products to make life easier for our customers. The PR Assistant is a new ChatGPT-powered generative AI feature that helps PR executives to write impactful media pitches and press releases much more quickly, by creating a high-quality first draft based on some basic information.

Although extremely powerful, the PR Assistant is incredibly simple to use. As you can see from this screenshot, most of the options are largely self-explanatory, but we’ll run through an example to demonstrate how it all works.

Tip: Read about the AI ethics we're following and learn more about how to optimize your press releases for LLMs.

To begin with, let’s use a fictional brief for a new product announcement we want to push out to the media, using the following text:

“Fluffee Stuff is a soft-furnishings manufacturer. We are launching a new range of giant cushions with popular internet memes printed on them, and plan to target college students and young adults as the key market for this product. These jumbo meme cushions are ideal for adding a little fun to any living space, lounge or bedroom, and they make great gifts. At launch, the cushions will be available with a selection of 10 of the most popular memes in history, including Success Kid, Distracted Boyfriend, and Sad Keanu, but going forward we also plan to include the top memes from each year in time for the holiday shopping season.”

This is a relatively short description. The PR Assistant can accept prompts of up to 4200 characters, and the more detail you can add to your prompt, the better the results will be. Nevertheless, this short prompt is enough for the assistant to create something we can work with.

First we’ll ask it to generate a media pitch that we can put into an email to journalists. 

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