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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

Influencer marketing is one of the top growth hacks for brands. It uses the audience and pull of an influencer to get in front of more people – people who are most likely to be interested in your products or services.

Why use influencers in your social media marketing? Glad you asked: influencers are true to their name because other people trust their recommendations. From local coffee shops to global brands alike, your target audience wants to know a brand’s worth before they pull out a credit card. A social influencer marketing campaign can steer more business in your direction and help you get ahead of your competitors. It's a win/win.

To sweeten the deal, brands have tons of options when leaning on social media influencers to share their brand. Our favorite places for influencer marketing are Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube.

Here’s how you can use each one to supercharge your influencer marketing.

Influencer Marketing on Social Media Platforms: In a Nutshell

Before we dive into the nuts and bolts of influencer marketing, let’s set the stage.

Influencer marketing is older than social media, but the term didn’t actually appear until the digital marketing era arrived. Think back to all those celebrity-endorsed cereal marketing campaigns you might have seen as a kid – that’s influencer marketing at work.

At its heart, an influencer marketing strategy is a lot like word-of-mouth marketing. Influencers recommend a product or service to their circle of followers. They use social media because it’s quick, cost-effective, and helps them reach tons of people with little effort. If the influencer has enough credibility, their followers will listen to their recommendations.

Reading Tips: Are you wondering how much influencer marketing costs? Learn more about influencer pricing and download our influencer rate card.

Sometimes, this process happens organically. An influencer discovers a great new hairspray or a bomb cocktail, for example, and tells their followers all about it.

And sometimes, this process happens based on a paid partnership with a brand. Just like digital ads, commercials, and direct mail, brands pay big-name influencers to market their products. Influencers can make a tidy sum just by giving their endorsement. In fact, professional influencers charge anywhere from hundreds of dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars per post.

But don’t let their high salaries discourage you from embracing influencer marketing. Even small brands with small budgets can find affordable influencers in their niche (usually micro-influencers fit the bill). We’re going to show you how right now.

More and more brands are turning to Instagram marketing as a way of reaching their target audience. Instagram has become a hot spot for micro-influencers, with more than 1 billion active users and tons of ways to create original content. And despite Instagram doing away with likes to “depressurize the user’s experience,” Instagram influencer marketing is still as potent as ever.

Recent research found that 83% of Instagram users discover new products and services on the platform. More than 8 in 10 also use the platform with the intent to research products and services, while 80% make buying decisions based on Instagram content.

Here’s how you can use Instagram influencer marketing in your strategy:

Finding the right Instagram ambassador will help you maximize your efforts. Take a look at their niche as well as their audience size. In what types of content do they specialize? Do they work with brands of your size and stature? Do they have a highly engaged audience?

One way to narrow your focus is to use an Instagram influencer app, like Influence.co or Meltwater's influencer marketing capabilities. Some influencer apps are free to use and let you filter results based on location and follower count.

Likewise, you can also do an Instagram search for branded or relevant hashtags. See who is sharing content with your chosen hashtags, then check to see if they have a large audience with a strong engagement rate into which you could tap.

Once you choose your Instagram ambassadors, work together on developing a dedicated Instagram influencer marketing campaign that has specific, measurable goals. Your influencer needs to know what you want to get from the partnership so they can present your campaign in the right light.

For example, do you want the influencer to demo your new mascara? Should they tell a story about their first time wearing your brand’s sneakers? Do you want them to organize a giveaway for your product?

If you are looking for direct sales, try turning your influencer into a brand ambassador. Set them up with a unique referral link so they can earn a commission each time someone purchases using their link. This is a great way to see just how much influence they give your brand.

Last but not least, you need a way to measure how much impact your influencer makes. This is why we recommend using goal-focused campaigns and not just “brand awareness.” Comparing analytics such as website visits and sales during influencer campaigns can help you see whether you’re moving the needle.

LinkedIn seems like an unlikely place for influencer marketing, given its emphasis on professional networking. For an eCommerce brand, this might be true. But as with any type of marketing, it’s all about finding your target audience.

LinkedIn works well for B2B influencer marketing. You might use LinkedIn influencers to generate interest in a conference or webinar, drive sales for digital products and B2B services, or gain podcast followers, for example.

LinkedIn is a different breed than other social media platforms. Here, influencers are more focused on growing their reputation than they are on paid posts. They want to expand their audiences, improve their brand image, and build their credibility. These things lead to high-paid endorsement deals from bigger brands and companies, which is what many influencers are really after.

In all honesty, partnering with LinkedIn influencers is just as beneficial to them as it is to you. With this in mind, let’s look at some ways you can run an influencer marketing campaign as a part of your LinkedIn marketing strategy:

Influencers can help you increase sign-ups and participation for your webinars or live Q&As. You end up sharing each other’s audiences, which can help you both grow your presence.

If you have a podcast, ask an expert to join and share valuable insights with your following. They can use your podcast in their own marketing, which can drive more traffic to your website and make you look credible by extension.

Blog articles can also give your influencers free ways to market themselves by highlighting their expertise. Not only does this give them something to share with their own audience, but it creates a high-value article for other authors to backlink to.

If you have a digital tool or service that you charge for, offer to give an influencer free access to it. Let them try it out and start using it in their own business. Sweeten the deal by giving them discounts or incentive codes to share with others.

One of the most popular platforms for influencer marketing is Facebook. Facebook influencers are easy to find in just about every niche. The platform has the world’s largest user base (roughly 2.89 billion), giving you tons of potential audiences to reach.

Facebook offers many features to support influencer marketing, from groups linked to business pages to branded content tags and even Facebook Live. The approach is largely the same on Facebook compared to other platforms. Influencers can recommend products to their audience, use paid ads, and create original, engaging content for the brand.

Tip: Take a look at our list of the top Facebook influencers

Video content is king on Facebook, accounting for more than 100 million hours spent on the network every day. Influencers can create unboxing videos of your products, demonstrate a product, do a video product review, or share a behind-the-scenes look at a product “in the making,” for example.

Facebook Live brings users into the moment and offers a raw look at your brand. Invite an influencer to attend a company event and have them broadcast their experiences to their fans.

Sponsored posts are paid ads, plain and simple. They include a designation letting others know it’s an ad. But don’t let that fool you – sponsored posts can be highly effective in driving immediate sales, especially if you give your influencer an exclusive discount to share with their fans.

Let your influencers put your products into the hands of real users. A contest via influencer marketing can be a great way to grow your following, drive users to your website, and gain user-generated content. Plus, your influencer will have the benefit of picking a winner and giving them a prize, all thanks to your brand.

One of the original influencer channels, YouTube influencer marketing is still going strong. Online video accounts for more than 80% of consumer web traffic. People love videos because they’re so versatile. You can watch a video to simplify a complex topic, learn the exact steps to do something, or discover new brands. Videos add visual interest to a topic and can appeal to a broad audience. The popularity of video is reason enough to create a YouTube marketing strategy. 

What does influencer marketing look like in the world of YouTubers? Here are some ideas to spark a new influencer partnership:

One of the most common YouTube influencer formats is to hire influencers to do video product reviews. The visual-heavy aspect of videos allows users to see all facets of a product, almost as though they were trying the product in-store.In some cases, influencers might trade a post in exchange for free products, helping you keep your costs low.

The influencer can talk about your product’s features and benefits, how it works, what they like and don’t like, and put your product in a positive light.

And with YouTube’s many integrated features, the video can also include a link to your store so viewers can purchase the product on the spot.

If you’d prefer to take a non-salesy approach to YouTube influencer marketing, try creating educational content. Educational videos can focus on your audience’s biggest questions and pain points. The influencer helps others solve their problems while making your brand (and their own) look good in the process.

Brand mentions within a larger context can give you a subtle nod without coming across too commercially. For example, you can work with an influencer to talk about a bigger topic and have them mention your brand organically in the conversation.

Using Meltwater as an example, we might ask an influencer to talk about the basic building blocks of social media monitoring. They could mention our Media Monitoring platform when they start talking about ways to monitor mentions at scale.

Though the content and the approach will vary, a few things remain the same no matter where you choose to use influencer marketing. Start by knowing who you want to influence. Decide what you want to happen next. Then find the right influencers whose audiences and skills fit the bill. From there, work on nurturing the relationship and enjoy a fruitful collaboration that benefits both sides.

For help finding, contacting, and partnering with influencers in your industry, get in touch to learn how our end-to-end Meltwater social influencer marketing platform can help you streamline the process of working with influencers. 

Influencer Marketing on Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook & YouTube

When I started reading up about social ROI, I found it so confusing. I wondered how other business leaders understood what influences the ROI of their campaigns and how they went about measure success. I’ll be the first to admit, I don’t do great with numbers or formulae. But I also noticed that when discussing social media measurement, most experts had substituted simplicity and comprehension for thoroughness and over-complication. That was when I decided to make sense of this topic.

In this article, I simplify the steps to measuring social media ROI and discuss the role consumer insights play in helping brands reach new heights with their campaigns.

The following blog is an adapted snippet from our latest whitepaper, "The Social Media ROI Playbook: Driving Growth with Social".

How Consumer Insights Enhance Social Media ROI

How to calculate the ROI of social media marketing

As Lewis Carroll (and later, George Harrison) so famously stated, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.” If you’re running a social media campaign without taking the time to use an analytics tool to both better understand your audience and assess if you’re getting the results you want to achieve, then you really don’t know where you’re going.

Social ROI matters because it tells you where you are, where you want to go and where you should be heading if you want your marketing campaign to work. Otherwise, you might as well be chucking all that time, effort, and money down a very deep well. 

The way consumers research, discover, and purchase products has changed dramatically over the past two decades. First, widespread adoption of the internet changed the way we buy, and then the advent of smartphones accelerated this disruption further. While marketers were still trying to make sense of this changing world, the global pandemic of 2020 turned everything on its head once more. 

Marketers around the world all face the same question now; what do consumers want? 

The world seems to change too fast for any of us to keep up, and trying to figure out how to capture the attention of customers in a noisy world can feel impossible. This is the problem that consumer insights aims to solve, answering fundamental questions such as: 

Do different communities or segments exist within my target audience? 

While similar, consumer insights and social listening are not the same things. 

Consumer insights go a step further than social listening and add qualitative analysis into the mix, trying to understand what exactly the results mean and what they can tell us about consumers. For example, social listening might tell us that from October to February people talk more about Scotch whisky on social media. On the contrary, consumer insights tell us that people enjoy whisky for its warming quality during the cold winter months and that they’re also interested in finding new whisky cocktail recipes. Armed with this social media data, brands can build more relevant and personalized messages that are more likely to appeal to consumers, increasing sales as a result. 

Consumer Insights platforms like Meltwater also enable marketers to identify new revenue streams by better understanding the Tribes that make up their audiences. Tribes refer to communities of like-minded individuals within a broader audience, who have more in common than demographics. They could have similarities in a number of different ways such as the media they consume, influencers they follow, brands they purchase, online conversations they participate in, the content they share, social channels they use, and more. Understanding all of this can help you to target campaigns at your tribes more effectively. That way you no longer need to guess which media to advertise in, which influencers to work with, or what kind of messaging you should use since consumer insights tools help you get the answers with a high degree of precision!

Want to learn more about the Meltwater consumer insights solution? Complete this form and we'll be in touch shortly! 

If your business has been trying to make sense of calculating the ROI of social media marketing, here’s where you should start.

The first step towards calculating the ROI of social media marketing is to decide where you want to go AKA, what are your goals and business objectives? What do you want to ultimately achieve through your social media campaign? For instance, you can choose to focus on one or more of the following goals:

Increasing brand reach and visibility online

Enhancing reputation as an expert and positioning your brand as a thought-leadership

The social media campaign that you decide to run will ultimately depend on your goals. For example, if you decide to go after leads, you will have to create a lead magnet – an incentive for which your prospects will share their email address or phone number with you. If you go down this route, you may wish to invest in doing some primary research and use the insights you find as gated lead gen content. Or, you may choose to run a Twitter card campaign or a Facebook ad campaign to generate leads from these two channels immediately, while creating a blog as a long-term campaign to generate leads from organic traffic.

If you decide to go after sales on your eCommerce website, Facebook carousel ads might be the best option for short-term sales and app downloads a more long-term plan to deliver content right to the buyer’s mobile devices.

As mentioned above, you also need to customize your social media campaign based on consumer insights. Once you understand where your audience is hanging out, you can narrow down the type of content you need to be creating. For instance, images will do best on Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest. If your demographic is largely a B2B audience that is active on LinkedIn and Slideshare, you will have to rethink your creatives and campaign.

Gone are the days when you had to wander blindly around the social media landscape, trying to figure out which posts are working best, or use the “Post and Pray” method of sharing content.

The wonderful thing about online marketing is that you can measure almost everything. From the content that works best on social media, to the path your visitors take through your website, to signups, leads, sales, and follow-up! Everything can be monitored, measured, and customized to optimize the customer experience.

If you’re using a CRM like Hubspot’s Inbound Marketing Software, you can customize and track your entire visitor experience. In fact, most good marketing CRM systems will have the option of using APIs to connect your social media analytics tool with your internal CRM data. This allows you to measure 'moments that matter' touchpoints along the customer journey making it easier than ever to spot patterns where prospects fall off the journey and fail to convert. With this knowledge, you can create campaigns and track which ones are working and which aren’t so that you can put your time, effort, and money into the social media campaigns that are getting the results you want.

What does social media return on investment (ROI) mean to you? Calculating ROI is ultimately about measuring the cost of a lead or sale and deciding if your marketing expenses were worth it. Only you can decide whether the ROI in social media campaigns was worth it to you.

There are a lot of social media monitoring tools, methodologies, and complicated formulae to calculate social media ROI, but the only one that actually makes sense is to ask yourself whether it was worth spending $5 on a Facebook ad to gain a lead that went on to convert to hundreds of dollars worth of sales on your website.

It’s up to you to decide what social media marketing campaigns make sense to spend on and what you can pass on. 

When measuring ROI, don’t forget to factor in the cost of your social media marketing agency or, if you’re doing it in-house, the salaries, time, expense, and effort it takes to go from point A to point B.

Once you have calculated your social media marketing ROI, it’s time to analyze your results using a social analytics tool, assess if they are taking you where you want to go, and tweak and fine-tune your campaigns to take you on a trajectory to social media success. 

It's a good idea to benchmark your results against a different period, usually, brands do this on a quarterly basis. This helps them see where they've moved the needle with their social media efforts. You can do this for your competitors too, if you decide to benchmark against your competitors, social media share of voice is a key social metric to use.

PS. Don't forget to download our new whitepaper, The Social Media ROI Playbook, for more tips on growing your business with social media!

This article was written by Priya Florence Shah from Business2Community and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.

Increase your Social ROI with Consumer Insights

Fear of missing out is not exclusive to us as individuals. Brands experience it, too.

Your team might be asking itself: If our brand is not active across today’s popular social network, are we risking relevancy? Are we losing mind-share with our audience?

Take Instagram. Although 87 percent of Instagram users use Instagram Stories, only 36 percent of businesses regularly post Stories. 

That's a missed opportunity for a lot of brands. The reason? Scheduling and publishing content across different social media networks in various social media formats requires coordination, patience, and time.

So, you may be asking yourself: Is there an app for scheduling Instagram Stories?

Well, today, Meltwater is excited to announce we’re making the process of scheduling and publishing Instagram Stories and carousel posts easier for brands!

Social media managers can now use our Engage product to build story and carousel content in advance, schedule a future post date, submit for pre-approval, and receive reminders before posting. No more professional FOMO.

Manage your Instagram marketing like a pro with Meltwater Engage. Get in touch to take a tour of our social media management platform.

Why Schedule Stories and Carousels in the First Place?

A quick recap for any social media managers just tuning in. 

Can you schedule Instagram Stories? The answer is: YES!

But, some may still be wondering: Why should you schedule your Instagram Stories in advance?

By scheduling your Instagram content ahead of time you can begin formalizing a process around posting content to your social media channels, meaning you can make more time for planning and creating content. Having more time for these two things means that you’ll be able to start posting more frequently. 

Plus, our platform can help alert you to the best time to post on social media, so you can trust that your posts and stories are going out at the optimal time. 

2. Ensure brand consistency with built-in approvals 

Using a social media management platform for scheduling your content allows you to create a governance structure that means you don’t have to worry about your social media intern going rogue on Instagram because they are publishing everything natively. Instead, you can assign user permissions and workflows to ensure a smooth publishing process. 

Publishing consistently across your social media channels helps you develop familiarity with your audience and establish your brand’s personality within your market. In a world where consumers spend 2 hours-plus per day on social media, consistently publishing and engaging across social channels keeps you relevant, modern, and top of mind with your audience. 

The media landscape today is fragmented, which means brands have to be active across multiple social media networks if they want to engage with their audiences. We’re excited to offer our customers the ability to schedule and publish Instagram Stories and carousel posts through the Meltwater platform to help them reach their audiences in new ways. 

Ready to seize the opportunity and start scheduling Instagram Stories? Get in touch to learn more about how to make the most of your Instagram marketing strategy using Meltwater.

All Meltwater Engage customers can now schedule, pre-approve, and publish Instagram Stories and carousels.

Scheduling for Instagram Stories and Carousel Posts

Because of Instagram-related limitations, no third-party solution can directly publish Instagram Stories and carousel posts. You can still build content, place it on the calendar for visibility, and submit it for pre-approval. You’ll just need to use the Instagram app for the final step of posting the content, with Meltwater alerting you in advance and helping you import the content. 

That’s it! Are you ready to eliminate your Instagram FOMO? The Meltwater platform makes scheduling Instagram Stories, carousel posts, and grid posts simple, so you can spend more time creating content that engages your audience. Plus, our platform allows you to schedule content across platforms, like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, so you can save even more time.

Don’t have Meltwater Engage? See Engage in action by scheduling a demo with one of our team members today:

Product Update: Scheduling Instagram Stories and Carousel Posts

Since the introduction of the internet and the rise of social media, enhancing the digital customer experience (CX) has become a differentiating factor and source of competitive advantage for organizations. Customer experience plays a critical role in improving customer satisfaction and loyalty, and due to its positive influence on customer retention rates, CX is also credited for increasing profits by 25-95 percent (Harvard Business Review, 2014). 

Despite its importance, some organizations fail to remember that customer experience doesn’t end with the purchase. As you can see from the customer journey diagram below, loyalty and advocacy should follow when positive customer experiences are present. This then leads to new recommendations and additional purchases, making CX a worthy investment. 

The following blog is an adapted snippet from our latest whitepaper. Download "The Social Media ROI Playbook".

Tip: Read this blog to learn more about the following questions: What is Customer Experience? And How Can You Improve it?

6 Tactics For Optimizing Customer Experience

Proactively making the digital customer journey more convenient and simpler for consumers to perform desired actions on your site or application is the holy grail of optimizing the customer experience. This can be achieved through the following tactics.

How can we gauge how our customers feel if we don’t listen to what they’re saying? 

With more and more people turning to social media when they have a query or complaint, it’s essential that we’re monitoring our social media channels for reviews, complaints, and queries. Such conversations provide brands with the information needed to optimize customer experiences and meet growing consumer demands. In turn, consumers feel heard and businesses can also better minimize the risk of complaints escalating and reputational damage. 

By using a media monitoring tool like Meltwater, we can quickly sift through millions of news stories and social media posts and track what is being said about our brand, competitors, and industry in real-time. This is necessary for increasing customer satisfaction, for example, if we don’t know about a negative post or story until it goes viral, it may be too late to prevent a PR crisis. 

Analyzing data from client surveys and social media is a great way to keep your finger on customer satisfaction. Organizations often turn to metrics including Net Promoter Score (NPS) as a way of understanding how satisfied customers are. In addition to this, companies rely on media monitoring to understand: 

The sentiment towards their brand (and whether it has changed) 

How competitors are doing from a customer experience perspective 

Get in touch and learn more about how media monitoring can support your CX strategy.

Customers are becoming more demanding with regards to query/ complaints response times on social media, in fact, 66% of people now expect a brand to respond in less than 24 hours. 

A social media engagement tool helps brands keep on top of social media engagements and assign particular cases to relevant members of the team so that issues can swiftly be sorted. That being said, it's worth keeping in mind that not all customers complain directly to a brand...

To overcome this challenge, we developed listening capabilities that allow Meltwater clients to set geolocations as a metric to monitor conversations. This means that companies can see who has complained within a certain geofenced location. Say the queue at a fast-food restaurant is too long and customers begin to complain but don't @mention the restaurant, for example, the restaurant will still be able to spot and engage with negative feedback.

Tip: Check out more customer experience examples.

Being proactive with engagement is arguably an even more powerful way to boost customer experience. Community management often helps brands spot problems before customers complain. By searching through keywords related to competitors, we may spot an issue that could easily occur for our business too, and put plans in place to prevent this situation from occurring. We can also surprise and delight fans simply by replying to them and showing that we're listening. 

According to a McKinsey survey, personalization can increase company revenue by 5-15%, something that should motivate even the most cynical marketer. By prioritizing personalization, we’re bridging the gap between data, technological experiences, and consumer delight.

These days we have so much data on our customers that can be used to tailor our products and services. Ian Truscott, growth director at agency MRM Meteorite explains that ‘the consumer understands the data we’re collecting on them, and they are starting to expect a relationship with you that’s based on that data.”

Netflix is the ultimate example of a company whose obsessive pursuit of customer satisfaction is often credited to its success. With thousands of films, series, and documentaries to scroll through, finding something to watch on Netflix would be a headache if the tech giant hadn’t focused on removing friction for the customer by tailoring each touchpoint. Through the use of AI-driven personalization, Netflix’s algorithm helps viewers whittle down choices and find the content most relevant to them.

Whatever service we offer as a brand, there are ways to personalize the customer experience. Here are a few personalization ideas to consider split by industry:

Airline: food menu tailored to individuals likes/dislikes

Holiday provider: personalized itineraries

B2B company: personalized email campaigns

Streaming service: personalized song or movie recommendations

Social media sites: algorithm based on who the individual most interacts with

Customer-centric innovation is another great way to improve customer experience. 

Retail giant, Amazon, understands that customers are loyal right up until the second somebody offers them a better service, so they strive to be a forward-thinking innovative corporation. Amazon wins at CX as it invests in innovative solutions, enhances digital infrastructure based on customers' wants and needs, and keeps up with trends to ensure they remain number one.

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