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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

Social listening for small businesses is especially powerful, as one good social listening tool can be used to serve multiple purposes in your organization. Social listening tools run the gamut from free to paid, but they follow the same adage as most things in this world: you get what you pay for. 

That being the case, I’ve seen a lot of discussions on LinkedIn Groups and the like wherein people debate whether or not paid social listening tools for small businesses are worth the spend. Having spent a good chunk of my career helping small businesses and nonprofits with their marketing plans, I’ll voice what may be a counterintuitive opinion here:

A lot of the confusion around social listening lies in the misapprehension that, because social listening tools monitor social media sites specifically, these are tools that should be used for social media marketing specifically – and social media marketing is still a murky discipline for a lot of us, often without well-articulated business goals that make finding the social media ROI a bit like a treasure hunt without a map.

Social listening is essentially a social search: good social media monitoring tools are harnessing Big Data to cut through the noise of gazillions of conversations happening simultaneously on social networks and giving not just the marketing teams, but all departments throughout an organisation the insights to actually establish those well-articulated business goals that any business initiative should have.

In that way, social listening tools aren’t so much a Swiss Army Knife as they are a spoon: just about everyone in the company can find a use for them. That being the case, good social listening tools can make the spend worth it by allowing multiple users to set up multiple profiles. So, if your marketing team is trying to figure out a way to get a spend through your boss for a social listening tool, the best way to do that is to make sure that your software is servicing a legitimate business need.  And so, without further ado…

5 Ways for Small Business to Get the Most out of a Social Listening Tool

Competitive analysis is an essential part of every business strategy. While a competitive analysis used to require a long, drawn-out and often expensive process with external contractors and agencies, these days, social listening can be used to benchmark yourselves against your competitors, in a variety of clever ways:

Positioning: What are your competitors saying about themselves – and is it resonating with relevant followers? Take a look at how your competition is positioning itself and its products and see if they’re getting any feedback from relevant community members that might inform your own marketing efforts. Don't just jump in and implement the insights you find, dig a little deeper and watch how conversations progress over a few months - you might find an interesting trend. If you're a small business, it's wise to look at other SMBs to ensure your budget can achieve the same things.


Product: Are your small business competitors giving any clues as to what they might be working on? How can you combat this with your own strategy? Again, don't be hasty and change company direction just because you know your competitor is working on something. Use the insights you find to explore deeper, for example, run an industry keyword search on the insight you've found to see if there's a progressive spike in engagement. Just because your competitor is doing something, doesn't mean its right. For example, you may find that conversation around a particular topic is dwindling, suggesting it's not a strategically wise move to follow suit.


Share of Voice: Which one of you is getting more engagement?  Vanity metrics like “followers” aren’t the best measurement of a social marketing strategy. Afterall, followers only bring something to the table if they engage with you. As such, instead of followers, use engagement as a success metric.


Awareness: Is their brand awareness growing or shrinking amongst relevant audiences– and how does that compare to yours?  One way to tell is to look at whether engagement is increasing or decreasing, and whether the folks engaging with you and your competitor’s brands are the same small group of people, or whether it’s growing.

Twitter is a really great way for testing subject lines and messaging on your follower. You can post the same article days apart and try different taglines, hooks and positioning to see what gets you the most clicks. This method also works well in crisis communication: if you’re using trying to manage a PR crisis, check to see whether your message is resonating with your customers in a way that suits your brand.

Using real audience data from your followers is a sure way to increase positive engagement. It's wise to document what you find and use the insights to pave way for your future content marketing strategy, for example, if you notice a trend in that your community responds better to humour, you may wish to lead with this tonality in a future advertising campaign.

Your competitors aren’t the only ones talking about products: industry influencers and consumers are talking, too. Put your small business's brand name as a general industry search term – you never know what you’ll find. If your brand only recently launched, it's unlikely you'll find conversations about your company, however, what relevant followers have to say about your industry as a whole/ competitor's products is equally as important and forms the basis of a good R&D strategy.

Do you know what your employees are saying about you? Sites like glassdoor cater to the detractor, so it’s not always easy to get an accurate view of how you’re perceived out in the world. None the less, it's important to understand what people think of your brand as this can considerably impact the people you attract working for your small business. Skills are critical - and so is a good brand reputation to plug the skill gaps you may have.

There are industry influencers and consumers, and then there are investors. Insights from all three are worth listening to when you’re looking at market trends, and any good social media monitoring software will have community features that allow you to tag and follow influencers.

Hopefully, this article has explained how your small business can leverage social marketing, and social media listening, to inform the strategies of your entire business rather than just the marketing team. For a more comprehensive view on social listening across the business organization, check our free social listening guide, or take a listen to our social listening webinar, both of which take a deep dive on how to best use social listening throughout your company.

5 Ways Small Business Can Use Social Listening Tools

When you’re at an event like SXSW, and you’re meeting people who can introduce you to other people, how do you follow through? As PR pros we know that introductions and relationships can make all the difference to the success of a campaign. So, asking for and meeting with a key contact is a skill set that is invaluable, whether you’re a PR pro or an entrepreneur.

One of my favorite things about the startup world is how generous people are about making important introductions. Everyone on the challenging adventure of building a company knows that you can’t do it alone, and there’s always someone out there— another founder, a potential customer, a mentor, an investor—that can help get you through tough times.

Unfortunately, most of us suck at getting or making introductions. It’s not something taught in high school (though it should be), at business school (it really should be), or at your job, but it’s one of the most critical processes to nail down.

Why is this so important? For starters, tell me if any of these scenarios sound familiar:

Someone offers to introduce you to a friend, and you get super excited, but that introduction never comes.

You get an introduction, but the person introducing you mischaracterizes who you are or your goal in connecting.

You email back and forth so many times looking for a right time and place that the meeting never gets scheduled.

When you show up to a meeting, the other person has no idea what’s going on or is uninterested.

Yeah, I’ll raise my hand for all four. When a productive meeting could be the difference between your company having a good or bad week, you want to ensure the introduction is a quality one. And when you’re getting 10 or more introductions a week while fundraising, you really want to make sure you’re handling these as effectively and efficiently as possible.

Here are four important concepts you need to know:

When you ask someone for an introduction, you’re creating more work for them. No matter how happy that person is to make an intro, they’ll appreciate it if you make their life easier.

Once an introducer agrees to an intro, send them an email that describes you/your company and why you’re hoping to meet this new person.

Try to write it in a way that allows the introducer to easily forward your email along. If not, at least include a blurb with all the information below that they can copy and paste into their email.

Most people despise receiving introductions without being asked first. This is a crucial social norm to understand, especially with people as busy as founders, mentors, and investors.

When you send the introducer a forwardable email or blurb, assume they will want to check with the other person if they’re okay with receiving an introduction. When I’m introducing a founder to an investor, I’ll usually send an investor an email like this first:

This double opt-in process can be a double-edged sword, but is usually a net positive. The introduction will likely take more time, and there’s always a chance the person will say no. But if you meet, the person will more likely to be happy and engaged while speaking with you because they’ve given permission first.

Sometimes, the double opt-in process takes time: the introducer may have forgotten to forward along your email, or the person may be slow to respond. Either way, it’s on you to send quick reminders and see how things are going after a few days. If the introducer is happy to make the introduction, they won’t be annoyed to get a friendly nudge here or there to move things along.

When done wrong, it’s one of my biggest pet peeves.

When you finally do receive the glorious introduction, try to respond ASAP! Some simple steps:

B) Thank the introducer and move them to BCC.

C) Reiterate how excited you are to meet (and, if appropriate, what you’re looking to accomplish).

D) Offer 3-5 specific dates and times. If possible, mention how or where the meeting will be conducted (usually either a place to meet or a number to call).

E) Mention that you’re flexible to change time or place if something is more convenient for the other person.

F) Offer to send the calendar invite if/when they confirm.

After giving and taking hundreds of introductions, I’ve found that this is by far the most effective and efficient process. D) is where most people mess up—assuming that the person we’d like to meet is busier than us, we write “please send me some times that work for you.” But being too accommodating, in this case, isn’t a good thing. It’s more work for that person to look at their whole schedule for gaps than it is for them to check availability for particular windows of time that you propose. If they are busy during all the times you suggest, they’ll usually appreciate your specificity and respond with a few available times.

All of this seems minor, but it’s imperative: it will help shorten the number of back-and-forths needed (and increase the probability) of getting a meeting on the calendar that can change everything. And then, don’t forget to follow up.

The Art of Asking for Important Introductions

Legal tech is on the rise. A report by Thomson Reuters confirmed a 484% increase in legal services patent filings over the last five years, led by the US, China and South Korea, as more firms invest in technology. This number reflects the “rise of alternative legal services – such as virtual law firms – and the rapid expansion of the online legal industry.”

According to Forbes, in the past 50 years, more than $750M has been pumped into U.S.-based legal tech.  67 legal tech financing deals were closed last year – more than ever before, with a record 27 in the final quarter.

London-based AI startup Luminance leverages pattern recognition and machine learning to pull valuable information from thousands of contracts and legal documents in seconds – particularly in the case of M&A.

The idea is that it takes out the tedious work, allowing lawyers to focus on the decisions that require human logic. The platform’s pattern recognition technology can also identify potential risks or unusual clauses and cases, ranking them to bring lawyers’ attention to the right place.

The firm has raised $10M as it sets sights on expansion into the US. Beyond pulling more insights, the technology enables legal review to be completed 75% faster, without using large teams of paralegals and junior lawyers working long hours.

While some fear this efficiency may replace some junior level lawyers, CEO Emily Foges is not worried. “You get all these time-savings in doing document review and you lose nothing,” she said. “You are gaining more thinking time.”

Legal Technology Services provides technical backbone for law firms

Co-founded by Chris Smoak and Twitch.tv’s Justin Kan, Legal Technology Services offers a suite of tools to power-law firms with the tech needed to better serve their clients – particularly in the startup space. They offer things like document creation, e-signing, and project management workflows.

The first firm to implement LTS technology was Atrium, which began as a way of pushing back against the traditionally slow-to-adopt industry when it comes to tech. Founded along with Kan, the firm aims to “make access to corporate legal services transparent and price-predictable by building the largest structured data platform for organizational and contract data…modelling how best to store this information, and inventing new ways for lawyers and paralegals to interact with the resulting structured data to help advise clients.”

According to the Financial Times, Sally Wokes, a partner at Slaughter and May, says Luminance can halve the time spent on due diligence.

A study by Deloitte predicts about 114,000 legal jobs are likely to be automated in the next 20 years and that technology has contributed to the loss of about 31,000 sector jobs.

While AI and automation tools in the legal profession will undoubtedly make the work of junior legal professionals and lawyers across the board more efficient and enable them to process more data much more quickly, many fear this will turn into dramatic job loss in the sector.

According to Nik Reed of Ravel, the goal instead is to enable those professionals to better use their judgment based on more comprehensive data insights. The human judgment call remains a crucial element for any legal decision. “What we’re hopefully doing is finding cases that you need to understand,” he said. “Professional lawyers have to use their intuition and their best judgment to understand the law.”

“We get AI to do a bunch of things cheaply, efficiently and accurately — which is most important,” says Wendy Miller, partner and co-head of real estate disputes at UK firm BLP. “It leaves lawyers to do the interesting stuff.”

3 AI Driven Lawtech Startups Changing the Legal Landscape

As a marketer, one of your many responsibilities includes monitoring online and traditional media channels to spot, understand, and identify trending topics online. But with millions of social media posts and blogs being published every single day, how are you supposed to keep track of everything? 

Well, to be honest, too many marketers simply are not, but a few have mastered the art of social media listening thanks to a media monitoring solution. That’s right: technology to the rescue!

A media monitoring platform, like Meltwater, can help even the busiest of marketers stay on top of the latest industry trends or generate campaign reports instantly. Beyond helping customers keep track of what’s being said about their brands online, our all-in-one communications platform allows customers to reach out to influencers and journalists to spark conversations.

So if you’re looking to understand how a media monitoring solution could help you improve your team’s workflows, we’ve gone ahead and outlined the top 14 reasons why over 30,000 enjoy using Meltwater.

1. Our platform saves you time when distributing news internally and externally 

Meltwater’s most widely used services globally revolve around the sharing of news, whether that be internal or external. Our Newsletter feature allows teams to easily curate custom news briefs for their team or organization on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. By keeping your team up-to-date with the ongoing happenings of your organization, competitors, and industry, you’re able to remain competitive. 

Our Newsfeed feature allows companies to automate the sharing of news around their brand to anyone outside the four walls of their company by creating a direct feed from the Meltwater platform to your website. 

2. We offer an all-in-one communications platform

The Meltwater platform is the most comprehensive media monitoring solution in the industry. Our solution allows PR and marketing professionals to streamline their media monitoring, reporting, influencer outreach, and social engagement. 

By expanding our social media listening & social media management functionality, this truly made Meltwater an all-in-one communications solution for modern marketing teams. We are constantly expanding our services, partnerships and APIs to improve upon the functionality our clients have known & loved for years. 

As a result of our growth strategy, we have developed a highly dedicated customer service team around the world. For customers, this means that we’re able to pair each of our customers with a local expert.

Going above and beyond has always been the goal of our Client Success team, and our clients agree according to our G2 reviews & rankings. We take a lot of pride in the level of support we are able to provide all of our clients globally.

4. Our custom monitoring & reporting for enterprise brands

For large organizations, navigating the global digital landscape can be a daunting task. Our Meltwater Enterprise Solution are specifically designed to assist you when it comes to monitoring mentions of your brand globally and locally. 

Essentially, our team operates as an extension of your department, curating daily briefings that contain only the most important information to your organization. Oh, and did we mention that we offer 24/7 dedicated support. 

5. We have one of the largest contact databases for journalists

PR and Comms professionals used to rely on lists as their contact database, but now, with solutions like Meltwater, PR pros can find media contacts who may be interested in their pitch. Plus, our solution’s PR analytics and reporting capabilities can help you optimize your media outreach strategy with pitch engagement metrics that gauge interest and can inform any follow-up strategy.

Coupling Meltwater’s proprietary Keyword Search with other filters such as beat, role, and location will help you find the most relevant contacts for your story pitch. 

6. Our platform lets you easily identify and contact millions of influencers

If you aren’t already using influencers in your marketing strategy, guarantee your competitors are! Meltwater’s Social Influencer program has millions of profiles, thousands of categories and years of historical data making it easy to find influencers in any category and location across Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Pinterest, and blogs.

With Meltwater’s Social Influencer’s platform, you are able to find, vet, and track your interactions across the millions of influencers available in the platform. Not only are you able to utilize the platform as a CRM system for your influencers, but you’re able to track the ROI of the work that you are doing with them to better identify who you should or shouldn’t be working with! 

7. Our platform lets you rank media mentions from different publications

Let’s face it: not all media mentions should be weighted equally. For instance, a mention in The Wall Street Journal probably has a bigger impact on your business than a mention on a local news website, right? 

Using our Custom Scoring capabilities, once you define your media priorities, our technology will automatically score all mentions moving forward. Beyond saving you time, Custom Scoring allows you to consistently measure the value of your media coverage, define the success metrics that matter, and report and benchmark their success over time. 

8. Our social listening capabilities are unmatched

With the most advanced social listening platform in the industry, Meltwater provides teams the data they need to be one step ahead of the curve. Our Explore platform allows teams to analyze billions of social conversations and identify their social strategy based on the existing happenings across every social channel. 

And if your team is looking to gain a deeper understanding of your social following, our partnership with Audiense allows your team to pull reports detailing a social audience’s buying habits, interests, brand affinities, and much more so that you can increase the success of their social efforts. 

9. We help you streamline your social media management workflows

Our platform is a one-stop-shop for social media managers looking to simplify their social media management efforts. Within our social media management platform, you can easily:

Analyze all of the social conversations happening around your brand, a specific topic or competitor

Manage all of your interactions with the outside world through direct messages, likes, retweets & replies

Schedule all of your social media content across Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn

Plus, with unlimited reporting, you can easily keep your finger on the pulse of all of your social channels while helping your team understand the success of their investments. 

10. We help you measure your brand’s share of voice 

Our reporting capabilities allow you to track your organization’s share of voice by region, company, product line or any other categorization so that you’re able to gain a deeper understanding of your digital presence. 

To help you determine how you stack up against your peers in a multitude of areas, our automated reporting dashboards can help you quickly refine your PR & marketing strategy from a growth perspective with relation to geographic, product-specific, demographic breakdown or any other specific breakout you’re looking for. 

11. Our platform’s automated and customizable dashboards

Reporting is not as easy as it may seem. A good report highlights your achievements, provides actionable insights, shows cause and effect, defends your budget and most importantly proves your ROI. 

With Meltwater’s reporting capabilities, you can easily generate reports with metrics that date back to 2010, including competitor benchmarking and YOY reporting. Our Impact Reports help demonstrate and prove ROI—with the ability to track how your content is read, absorbed, and repurposed. But if you want to track specific PR & marketing KPIs, you can create customized dashboards, with metrics like media volume, geolocation, article sentiment, share of voice, top journalists and influencers, and audience reach and engagement. 

12. The ability to actively monitor the competition 

Competitor benchmarking is important because it gives you insight into industry trends, opportunities, strategies, and goals. By setting up a competitor dashboard in your media intelligence platform, you can keep an eye on results by comparing the share of voice, reach, and coverage numbers. 

If you’d like help keeping track of your competitor’s digital spending and activity, our Digital Marketing Insight Reports (DMI Reports) are automated marketing reports that enable you to optimize your PR, paid ads and SEO strategy. Ultimately, they help you save time and improve efficiency when planning your campaigns. 

13. We help you quickly identify trending content and hashtags 

One of the most valuable pieces of information for marketers is spotting, understanding, and monitoring trending topics online. These topics are what people are discussing in real-time and reveal what their interests and intentions are. Staying on top of the latest trends can help inform thought leadership content, spark ideas for new marketing content, and, ultimately, determine business decisions. 

So how do marketers always seem to know what the industry trends are? And once you have spotted a trend, what do you do next? Using Media Intelligence and Social Listening, you can understand how journalists, celebrities and your audience are reacting to them. Is the sentiment analysis positive, negative or neutral? Are there particular words or behaviors they are associating with the trend? Answering questions like these will help you understand how to zero in on that particular trend for your business.

14. Our partnerships provide in-depth audience insights 

Customers are demanding more personalized communication, but many brands don’t have the audience insights needed to deliver more 1:1 communications. Meltwater’s Consumer Insights Reports allow you to identify and understand any audience, no matter how specific or unique it is—enabling you to adapt your target, improve relevancy and drive high campaigns at scale. With the report, you can determine what media outlets hold influence over your target customer, what brand or celebrities they follow, where they are located, what type of content they share and engage with, and much, much more. 

Ready to learn more about Meltwater’s solutions? Fill out the form below or take a look at our resource page. 

14 Reasons Why Companies Choose Meltwater for Media Monitoring

In the crowded market of colleges and universities, making sure your brand stands out while increasing engagement with your community can be a challenge. That’s why we like spotlighting schools who go above and beyond with their social strategy. Here are five of the best.

It’s no secret that social media has become younger generations’ primary form of communication. From communicating with friends and family to keeping up with the latest news, social platforms serve a variety of purposes.

When it comes to attracting prospective students, interacting with current students, and staying connected with alumni, universities have embraced social media as a powerful marketing tool.

Here are the 5 best university social feeds that are truly a notch above the rest.

You might know the University of Michigan as the Wolverines, but did you know they are also pioneers on the Snapchat front? As only the second university in the United States to begin marketing on Snapchat, they’re the undisputed experts in the field.

One week after launching their Snapchat account, they gained over 1,100 followers on Snapchat, and received nearly 800 snaps. Each snap showcased a unique part of campus life.

To this day, the University of Michigan continues to be the best university social feed for engaging students on a variety of platforms.

California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

Home of the Mustangs and situated along the central coast of California, the California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) team deserves to be right up there with the best university social feeds in the nation.

They’ve done a lot of great stuff on social media, but my favorite is their #CalPolyNow hashtag campaign to help share students’ voices and experiences via photos and videos.

On Instagram, for example, students are asked to use Cal Poly hashtags while posting and the social team then curates that content, sharing it on the main university account. The team tags the student and uses the #CalPolyNow hashtag to add hyper-relevant user-generated content to their stream.

NYU is an inspiration to not only the collegiate world but to brands everywhere.

Did you know that they manage more than 1,000 social media accounts campus-wide? Incredible!

Located somewhere between mid-and-downtown in bustling streets of New York City, NYU takes full advantage of their incredible landscape, offering students, alumni, and prospective students a daily dose of inspiration.

In and of the city: Broadway 🚋 #instaNYU

But busy city streets aren’t the only thing they’re good at. The NYU social media team also shares real, heartwarming stories of their students:

These “Violet Spotlights” are some of their most engaging content on Facebook in terms of likes, comments, and shares.

Harvard. The oldest and quite possibly, most renowned university in the world, isn’t only known for their academic prowess. Harvard also has one of the best university social feeds in the business – demonstrating that with great intellect comes great creativity.

With more than 7,000,000 followers across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, the Harvard social team drives tens of thousands of engagements on a daily basis. Of course, much of their content is educational (and mind-blowing!) in nature:

Firefly, a new microscope from Harvard's Cohen Lab, can show how neurons pulse, communicate, and shine. The microscope's large field of view and fast imaging capability allows it to image electrical signals quickly traveling from neuron to neuron.⠀
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The images could illuminate how disorders like epilepsy and Alzheimer’s disease affect neuron communication and thus enable researchers to discover how to prevent and treat a host of neurological diseases.⠀
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Here, each bright dot represents one neuron in the brain of a genetically modified mouse.⠀
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Credit: Vaibhav Joshi⠀
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#brain #science

Harvard uses their various social media channels as a way to educate, inform, and inspire:

Harvard University on Twitter: "How parents talk to their children changes children’s brains, @HGSE research shows https://t.co/6Bnhasqwml"

Instead of telling current students, prospective students, and alumni why Harvard is great, they show them.

The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) makes the most of its breathtaking on-campus architecture, as well as the stunning California weather.

Their social media presence is a constant reminder to students, alumni, and community why they’re one of the most sought-after universities to attend.

UCLA on Twitter: "Natural lighting is the best lighting. ☀️

#SceneAtUCLA photo by https://t.co/d4i5rokLUy… "

By creating the simple hashtag #SceneAtUCLA, their Instagram account is encouraging everyone to be a part of the visual story. The hashtag has been used more than 11,000 times on Instagram alone!

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