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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

Does your B2B public relations strategy include Facebook? Many B2B companies dismiss Facebook because of its simple beginnings as a friends and family network. Yet, Facebook has evolved to become a prime opportunity in the B2B space.

Facebook, when wielded correctly, can put a face to your B2B PR efforts and deliver results. It can be used to…

Would you like a piece of this action? Let’s look at how you can develop a strong Facebook presence that puts you in the driver’s seat of your PR.

Facebook has reached a point of name recognition, technological prowess, and user loyalty that rivals major tech players like Google and Apple. –Jayson DeMers

9 Elements to Help You Bring Your Facebook A-Game to Your B2B Public Relations

An effective PR strategy—on or off Facebook—requires clear goals. Before you go any further in your Facebook development, lay out what your goals are. I guarantee it will make the journey to successful B2B PR that much easier. Your goals might include:

Whatever your goals are, make sure your team is on the same page, everyone working toward the same end result.

2. Pick a Brand-Appropriate Profile Picture

Make your profile picture count. Steer clear of any photo that could cause confusion or blank looks. Since this is the first item your audience will see, it should be brand-centric. If possible, use your brand’s logo. Remember, this will show up on everything — besides your posts, comments, and any other activity.

Notice the following examples, in which Coca-Cola, SAP and Zendesk use their profile pictures to advantage with their brand logo.

This appears right under your profile picture, and is your brand’s introduction. It requires forethought. If you don’t write anything here, it’s a wasted opportunity. Use this space to write a clear and to-the-point introduction that inspires confidence and motivates prospects to engage with you. Stay away from boring facts, and focus on what gives your brand its personality.

For instance, if you’re a technology brand, you want to show that you’re at the forefront of the digital era. If you’re a financial institution, you want to create a sense of trust right off the bat. Consider the following:

Working hard to bring innovation and technology to life for the modern business.

We use our industry knowledge and expertise to fight the financial battles, so you can concentrate on your business.

These are short and quippy but deliver a clear message to all visitors.

4. Leverage Your Cover Photo to Promote Your Current Company News

Your cover photo is valuable real estate, and should never go stale. Change it often and keep it fresh according to what’s happening within your company. Have you recently participated in a community fundraising event? Create an image that shows it off. You could use this to promote:

Once you’ve created a cover photo for your news, include a pinned post with a link to more information.

Social media is all about visual content. One study showed that Facebook posts with images received 2.3 times more engagement than those without images. It is well worth your time and resources to promote visual content creation. This includes images, infographics, charts, videos, and more.

Since the fairly recent addition of Facebook Live Video (and other networks following suit), we’ve seen evidence of just how much video counts in social media engagement. Customers want to see new developments as they occur within your company and to have the sort of transparency that builds trust. Live video does just that. One study showed that Facebook users watch live video three times more than traditional video, which is evidence of the power behind this feature.

IBM is a great example of leveraging video (both live and traditional) in its Facebook strategy. Take this one, showcasing IBM’s role in the movie, Hidden Figures. It tapes IBM’s archives to show how it contributed to the historical accuracy of the film. It’s a great, behind-the-scenes explanation that skillfully leverages the popularity of the film to shine light on the company.

Companies that want to be on the leading edge would do well to integrate Facebook Live video into their marketing strategies. –Mari Smith

Ever notice the Trending Topics section in your Facebook’s dashboard? Don’t dismiss it offhand—it gives you valuable information you can use to your benefit. In fact, Facebook gives priority to posts that are about these trending topics. Want a higher place in your audience’s feed? Then craft a post that touches on one of these trending topics, while still remaining relevant to your brand and audience. It’s a great way to work your way up the social ladder.

There are no hard and fast rules about what works and what doesn’t on Facebook. You will have to discover yourself the perfect cocktail of Facebook engagement for your B2B company. Facebook Insights is a wonderful measurement tool to see which posts receive more engagement, and which you can skip. You can also consider using tracking codes such as Bitly to see what people are clicking on.

In the end, you need to find out what works, and stop what doesn’t.

Timing matters — it can make the difference between high engagement and crickets. It can take a while before you find the right timing for your audience, so don’t be afraid to play around until you get it right. Monitor which days and what time of day your posts perform best, and stick to that schedule.

Facebook is all about engagement. People will comment on your page for all sorts of reasons — to ask a question, get support, and even file a complaint. Answer all of these as soon as possible. When you practice this, it creates loyal customers and builds your brand’s reputation as a reliable B2B company.

Examples of Real B2B Companies that Are Killing It on Facebook

IBM is a great example of using your cover image to promote your PR campaigns. Right front and center, its image promotes its diversity initiative, as well as its role in the recent box office hit, Hidden Figures.

HP Business is not afraid to leverage everything that Facebook has to offer — with a rich collection of photos and videos that engage its audience, and an informative About section that builds confidence in its expertise.

Salesforce, a customer success platform, is not afraid to show its B2B company’s personality throughout its Facebook page. Posts skillfully lead back to its website, but also include curated content that promotes the company’s industry expertise.

Use your cover image in conjunction with your B2B PR campaigns

Leverage images and video as much as possible throughout your Facebook experience

Use topics that are trending to rank higher in your audience’s news feed

Amp up your engagement by always responding to comments, questions, and complaints made on Facebook

When done right, Facebook can become an integral part of your B2B public relations strategy. To get deeper into the reeds with your B2B PR, download our ebook to gain insight into 11 Lessons that PR pros need to learn in a digital world. Try it for yourself, and you won’t be sorry.

How to Leverage Facebook in Your B2B Public Relations

For the past five years, Instagram has been an important tool for marketing and PR pros, allowing brands to produce everyday imagery to connect with audiences. But, as with every platform, the rules change and evolve which can affect your efforts to boost organic engagement. In this article, we look at how to get out from under a shadowban. 

More companies are noticing a drop in Instagram engagement, and more viewers who unfollow, despite the fact that the platform’s growth is accelerating. As soon as brands started noticing the drop-off and eventually compared notes with each other, theories emerged as to why certain posts were seemingly being suppressed, and the phenomenon was labeled a shadowban. In fact, the Instagram shadowban started being mentioned on social media in November 2016. By June 2017 it became a much-speculated-about, trending topic. Here we look at some of the best practices you can use to keep building engagement on the platform.

Mentions of the Instagram shadowban didn't significantly appear on social media until mid-November 2016, but after late March 2017 they gained steam and in many ways, are still relevant today.

It’s important to note that Instagram has never acknowledged an official policy for “banning” posts or hashtags. However, brands and influencers reported that their engagement on the platform had decreased noticeably. And, we know that Instagram does take initiative in terms of identifying and mitigating bot influx, so new precautions will continuously affect our ability to gain organic reach. We can see this in the anecdotal evidence from Amanda Rose from ldn rose “I noticed that I was getting close to no new followers a day. Previously I would get around 5-8 new followers a day (albeit I would also lose at least 3 a day ha!). The lack of new followers wasn’t too concerning. But, the drop in likes and comments was frustrating.” 

In previous posts, we’ve covered hashtag use as a way of hooking audiences that might not be following you. But with the shadowban, it seems like the use of these has led to posts being suppressed. Hashtags are essentially a search feature, and by associating your brand with a related one (preferably one that’s trending), you’re increasing the chances of your content being found. For instance, someone might type the associated tag into Instagram’s search field. Or they might simply click on the one in a post they’ve come across. But what if the hashtag you’ve associated yourself with leads to the opposite, and your post fails to show up in search results or public streams?

As Maggie Marton from BlogPaws put it, “….shadowban waters are pretty muddy. We reached out to Facebook (they own IG) for additional information. One thing we learned is that “shadowban” isn’t an official term at Facebook. It appears to be the pop culture term—along with ghost ban, stealth ban, or shadow ban.”

The shadowban has been associated with the use (or misuse) of hashtags, discovered when users started conducting some experiments. As Moonlit Creatures explains, “I’ve gone through ALL my hashtags and discovered that the #boho hashtag is broken. Using even one broken hashtag will render ALL your other tags useless! I don’t know if just this one thing will fix all my Insta problems, but I’m staying optimistic.” In other words, a post with an “offensive” hashtag will not show up in searches for any of the other hashtags listed in the post.

As a result of being shadowbanned, only your current followers will see your hashtagged posts as they show up in their stream (and if your followers were to re-gram your images, these images would be subject to the same shadowban). Not only does this limit your engagement with the greater IG community, but it can also lead to a stagnant or even negative growth rate. Obviously, the exact opposite of what we want.

Understanding the shadowban has become an even bigger priority since Instagram now allows stories to be hashtagged to receive additional platform exposure, based on these hashtags. It has been speculated that Instagram’s hashtag scrutiny is motivated by their attempt to use hashtags for ad planning, and to stop users from getting attention when they use irrelevant hashtags or overload posts with hashtags, thereby making the hashtag taxonomy less effective.

While brands still think of the shadowban as a problem, Instagram has avoided addressing related issues as bugs that need fixing. Instead, the platform has tried to provide guidance on the level of content: “We understand users have experienced issues with our hashtag search that caused posts to not be surfaced. We are continuously working on improvements to our system with the resources available. When developing content, we recommend focusing on your business objective or goal rather than hashtags.”

If You’re Caught in the Net of an Instagram Shadowban, What Should You Do?

Go here to check the posts you think may be affected. Be warned that this is an educated guess as to how the algorithm is identifying posts to shadowban. Another way to check is to log out of your account, search for the hashtags you’ve used in a specific post, and see if that post comes up in the search results. If your images aren’t showing up, posts with this hashtag might be flagged.

Then, Grab Strategies for Success from Top Instagram Influencers

Make sure you aren’t using any of IG’s banned hashtags that have been overtaken with spammy posts.

Form an Instagram Pod or Engagement group: A pod is an informal group of like-minded accounts that visit each other’s photos and feed the algorithm by engaging via original comments and likes. Learn more about influencer pods.

Even if Instagram allows 60 hashtags per post, should you really use that many? Use hashtags sparingly in conjunction with your branded hashtag(s). The Instagram limit per post is 60, but you may want to be more targeted and not come off as spammy with your hashtags.

Don’t use third-party apps to post photos, especially with hashtags. Revoke account access to any third-party apps you’ve enabled. Instagram isn’t a fan of third-party apps that like, post comments, or post hashtags on your behalf.

Be authentic when you comment on Instagram photos (and do it manually). If you reply on behalf of your brand in a generic or formulaic way, you may be flagged as a bot or deemed to generate irrelevant content.

Change from posting as a business account to posting as a personal account, be advised you’ll lose business capabilities, like insights and a Contact button. Know that Instagram may give you leeway to fly under the radar if you are not seen as being on the platform to generate revenue. Along these lines, unlink your Facebook fan page from your Instagram account.

It’s possible that Instagram will assess the impact on their channel as a whole and decide for themselves whether they will lighten the restriction or worse, increase them. If all this lowered engagement, excuses about resources, and lack of acknowledgment of a ban seems a little too convenient, there is always the option of taking out an ad. As Alexander from the Preview App remarks, “Instagram rolled out its Business Profile features. It wants you to pay THEM to get more engagement.”

To further protect your engagement and monitor the health of your keywords, see a demo of how you can keep track of what matters to you on Instagram, and stay ahead of shadowbanning. Simply fill out the below form and we'll be in touch!

7 Ways to Beat an Instagram Shadowban

Syndicated content travels fast. While cooped up only on your website, your content can only be viewed by your audience, but get your content reposted on other sites, and it can really take off.

Although getting your content syndicated by having it posted on other sites will help your own site’s traffic, the biggest benefit is getting your company’s name out on the internet. Your brand can be at the center of discussions on hundreds of websites, all of which will begin to associate your company with authority and relevance when it comes to your subject matter.

Syndicated content (work that’s properly attributed to you) should be sent out far and wide. After all, drawing in a big audience is the whole point of content marketing, and it doesn’t always matter if they’re not seeing your content on your own site initially.

Here are a few tips to developing a greater presence online through content syndication

There are a lot of platforms designed to help you get your content out onto as many sites as possible. The most powerful and effective networks offer a paid service: for a fee, you’re able to get your content onto a wide network of websites with ease.

You’ve seen a lot of ads that are created by these networks before. Any ‘recommended’ list of articles ‘from the web’ falls into this category. Typically these lists are paid for but designed to blend in seamlessly with the website they’re appearing on.

There are a lot of different services that all provide a slightly different distribution method. While some of them are more popular than others, which one you should use will depend on which service works best for you.

Some discovery networks that are worth checking out include:

Through using these sites, you can get your content out to the widest possible audience and get your content distributed as widely as possible. Bear in mind, though, that to get the maximum exposure from these services, you will have to pay for your success.

LinkedIn is first and foremost a social media designed for the development of career networks.

In addition to this, though, it’s also an excellent avenue for syndication, as it’s filled with regularly posted articles that are written by members of the community. In the past, gaining the opportunity to write or feature an article on LinkedIn was invite-only, but this rule has since been relaxed, meaning that anybody can submit content to the blog.

LinkedIn is particularly useful because its audience is very specific:

The site’s Sales Navigator/ Slideshare blog gets hundreds of thousands of hits regularly

The audience is highly focused on business, though, meaning that this is an excellent avenue in particular for B2B marketers.

The site generates a lot of long-tail traffic, with visitors coming to articles many months after they’ve been initially published.

The trick to getting syndicated content to succeed on LinkedIn’s publishing platform is the same as getting content to succeed anywhere. Make sure it’s high quality and people will be happy to read it, engage with it, and share it with their LinkedIn friends.

Posting content on LinkedIn will naturally lead readers back to your own site, and will help grow your authority in the area that you’re discussing.

There are a lot of communities online that focus on aggregating and collecting the best possible content.

Think of sites like Reddit or Digg as big publishing services for all types of content, carefully arranged by category. When working to syndicate your content, it’s helpful to use these communities to draw in audiences.

Try exploring the communities surrounding the big sites in order to get your content in front of as many people as possible:

Anybody can post content, but there are rules about how much you can post to avoid being accused of spamming.

There are a variety of communities (called ‘subreddits’ on Reddit) which discuss content on specific topics. Some of these are niche, but the more specific you go, the fewer people are regularly checking the sites. Check out our Reddit Marketing Guide for more information.

In order to avoid being accused of posting spam, it’s not enough to simply post up links to your content. These communities exist to discuss content rather than just consume it, so to become a respected part of the community you need to take the time to get involved, comment on other content, and share content from a variety of websites. As you build your reputation, though, these social sites are excellent avenues for syndicating your work as long as they’re used sparingly.

For syndication to work, you want as many people to reuse and repost your content as possible, as long as they’re rightfully attributing your content back to you. For this reason, it makes sense to make the process of syndicating your content as easy as possible.

Embed codes provide this simplicity: a small piece of code displayed in your content when posted on your site can be copied by a reader and pasted into their site to easily display your content on your site.

This is useful for several reasons. 1. It makes content syndication easy for your audience. 2. You can be sure that your content is appropriately attributed as it’ll appear on their site exactly as it does on your own.

Allowing the embedding of your content is particularly useful for visuals such as infographics which other sites might want to use to add flavour and imagery to their own posts.

It’s literally what RSS stands for – Really Simple Syndication: it’s a tool that’s designed to help syndicate your content for all those who want to get their hands on it, over a variety of convenient platforms.

In order to broaden your syndication opportunities, you can make your RSS feed available to a wider potential audience.

There are plenty of RSS aggregation sites online which are designed to combine and collect a wide range of RSS content to put it in front of the people who’ll want to see it.

Submitting your RSS feed to these sites means that your content will appear alongside other work on a wider range of collected RSS feeds.

This doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll get a lot of extra traffic per RSS feed – your content will be mixed in with a lot of other work, so it won’t get a huge amount of attention

By submitting to as many RSS directories as possible, though, you’ll see your efforts add up to a solid increase in traffic.

Through getting your content syndicated in a variety of RSS directories, you’ll get an increase in traffic from putting your content in front of a lot of new viewers.

The more places your content is syndicated, the further it will travel.

This means that you shouldn’t overlook any place to post or mirror your content – especially high profile online communities filled with personal blogs. Sites like Hubpages, Scribd and Medium let anyone start their own blog on the site. You can create your own blog on these sites and repost all of your content from your site.

The communities surrounding these blogs are tight-knit and appreciate new content so long as you’re willing to engage with other community members.

Make sure you do engage, though – small blogging communities online are a great opportunity to develop a reputation as an expert in your field. It doesn’t take much extra energy to create a mirror site on open blog platforms, but it can provide a nice boost to traffic as you syndicate your content on other sites.

Social media is a natural choice for syndicating content, particularly anything visual. You can get your content in front of specifically targeted people by buying ads on social platforms. Good quality content will be shared by online communities, reaching further.

I’ve already spoken about the usefulness of LinkedIn for syndication, but there are ways of using many social sites for spreading your content. Visual or video content works particularly well as it can be shared widely with ease and catches the eye easily. Don’t use links – post your content directly into social media to help it become more accessible and sharable.

Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are all welcoming of content in a variety of forms, and there are plenty of visual-only social media tools such as Instagram or Pinterest that will help your content travel further.

Don’t worry if you don’t see a huge boost in traffic: getting your brand’s persona out to audiences is the most useful thing you can achieve from these posts.

A lot of big, powerful sites are very happy to receive syndicated content.

They’re so happy, in fact, that sites like Mashable, Huffington Post and Business 2 Community all welcome content submissions. These sites and others like them are an excellent place to get your content syndicated: You’ll benefit from their very large readership and the exposure that comes along with that. Picking the right site can mean targeting a specific audience that’s going to be interested to hear what your business has to say.

Of course, considering the popularity of these websites, they receive a lot of submissions regularly. That means that they only choose the best content to syndicate, and you’re up against some stiff competition to gain their attention.

To make sure your content is exactly what they’re looking for:

Make sure your content is appropriate to the site you’re pitching to – if your work doesn’t match their tone, style, or focus, it’ll be rejected.

Submit only the highest quality content – they want to see your best work.

Don’t submit too much content – but be bold and try repeatedly if rejected to find the perfect piece of work for their site.

Through making use of popular outlets, you can make sure your syndicated content reaches the widest possible relevant audience.

Plenty of big websites readily and openly syndicated submissions to help supplement their regular content.

Just because a site doesn’t advertise a need for syndicated content, though, it doesn’t mean they aren’t willing to accept submissions.

For many sites, the idea of opening the floodgates to submissions would mean bringing huge waves of content upon themselves. Instead they choose a closed-door approach, reaching out to creators privately or only syndicating content when approached directly by creators.

To get your content on other sites, often all that’s needed is a friendly email. Send a message to the site’s content editor, explaining who you are, why you’re an authority on your subject, and offering your content for syndication. Alternatively, many sites have an email address you can contact to share story tips – wherever possible, though, try to talk directly to a person.

The syndication opportunities that come out of this will be rare but beautiful. You won’t be fighting any competition for attention, meaning your syndicated content will have a large audience’s full attention. You’ll also be able to build a useful relationship with the editor of a popular site, meaning that you’ll be developing ties with influencers in your industry.

Making more personal, private contact to ask sites to syndicate your content will provide fantastic results as long as you’re persistent and polite throughout.

Syndication is an incredibly useful arrow in your content marketing quiver.

Through using the tools at your disposal to get your content in front of a wide audience, you can develop your reputation, build a strong following, and increase the traffic to your site.

This article originally appeared in Louder Online. This article was written by Aaron Agius from Business2Community and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.

Content Syndication: 9 Tools and Strategies to Try

Sponsored content now dominates many of the major social media apps including Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. So, how does a savvy PR pro know when it’s best to use paid content, and when to avoid it? First, it’s important to understand that sponsored content is a subset of native advertising. Unlike native advertising – actual ads that are designed to look like the places in which they appear – sponsored content is intended to bring value to the person reading or viewing it, in addition to being a type of long-form ad for a service or product. However, the “ad” aspect should take second fiddle to the “value” aspect of good sponsored content.

Why the stress on adding value? Thanks to over-use of native ads to spread questionable products and news stories, sponsored content has developed a bit of an audience trust problem. Since other marketer's slap-dash efforts might affect opinions of sponsored content, your brand will need to work a little harder to earn and keep the consumer’s trust.

Some brands have a clear path to offering valuable information for their readers. For example, Consumer’s Credit Union placed several items of sponsored content into the Daily Herald, promoting credit unions by making their potential value clear, and by offering advice on common financial problems, such as the impact on your taxes of a home assessment. Good things happened with these articles. First, the host publication, the Daily Herald, made them clearly marked as sponsored content and took it a step further by making their sponsored content searchable. This presented the content in context – important for trust-building. Second, the pieces were simple blog posts – very attainable on a tight budget for most companies – and offer information that the reader could use. While the idea is to inspire the reader to reach out to the credit union for more information, the approach was “helpful first, sales second.”

What if you sell a service and not a product? Sponsored content works for that also. It’s not uncommon to see a business that offers a service, like a consulting, advertising or marketing agency, write a sponsored post on a site like Marketing Land to get in front of their readers. In keeping with our previous example, sticking to text and submitting long-form articles or blog posts with plenty of visuals is the most cost-effective way to get into sponsored content.

Some well-known examples of sponsored video marketing come from big brands like Budweiser, but small to medium-sized business aren’t priced out. The big Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are now the publishers of sponsored content, and you can get content like a sponsored video published in new places with a tight budget. In fact, it’s probably going to cost you more to have a good video made (unless you have a video wiz on your team) than it will to have it placed. However, our assessment is that words on a page with good images are still your best bet.

What are some guidelines for sponsored content?

Understand your target audience: For example, a recent study of global executives showed a surprising result: 84% of those surveyed are open to high-quality, clearly marked, helpful advertising from brands. Younger audiences and users of tools like Instagram, Imgur, and Facebook are also open to appropriate advertising as long as it's not pandering in tone, and readers of blogs like Buzzfeed and Bustle have come to expect sponsored content, making them more open to it (as long as it is well done – if it is not, they will let you know!). Great PR analytics can help you find where your audience is and if the sites and platforms are open to your content marketing or hosting sponsored posts.


 Assess multiple potential venues: Social media and news sites are usually the first to come to mind when marketers and PR's think of doing sponsored content, but much of the business world is still stuck using email marketing, for example. Partnering with a great email newsletter to reach their audience should not be overlooked. Other potential contenders include popular marketing podcasts, where you can create audio content that fits their consumer interests.


 Make sure your content is in a format that is welcome: Auto-play video and audio are seen as incredibly intrusive and are one of the top reasons people use adblocker and audio blocker plug-ins and extensions. Take a good look at the future host of your content to understand what their consumers want to see, then work hard to fit in.


 Utilising Influencer Marketing: As Marketer's and PR's, you should do a thorough assessment of cost and audience before partnering with an influencer for sponsored content. Influencer marketing is thriving right now. Instagram and Snapchat certainly have their share of influencers creating sponsored content but they are now required to clearly disclose if a post is an ad. There are few industry standards when it comes to compensation and contract, so you’ll have to set your own guardrails here, and work with your PR firm to evaluate fit before reaching out. 


Disclosure, disclosure, disclosure: The FTC is setting clear rules about disclosures these days, so make sure you understand them and comply. Being creative with images and hashtags can help with disclose requirements on sites that are tight for space, like Twitter. If you’re not comfortable disclosing that your ad is sponsored, an old school guest post swap might be a better way to go for your brand.

If you’re wondering if sponsored content is right for your Marketing/PR strategy, do your due diligence while setting up your communication plan.

When to Use Sponsored Content

Public relations is enjoying a bit of a resurgence these days as a method of raising a brand’s visibility.

75 percent of marketers say they plan to increase PR spending over the next five years, says a report conducted by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and the USC Center for Public Relations at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

In spite of this rise in popularity, PR isn’t nearly as effective when a client has misconceptions about how it works.

Here are a few common client misconceptions about PR:

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