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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

Running a contest on Facebook can be a great addition to your social media marketing plan. In one of my recent surveys, I found out that fully 32% of all Facebook users have liked a Page because of a competition on Facebook.

While marketers want to create a magical competition that increases engagement on Facebook, many fall short and end up violating Facebook’s promotion terms or giving away expensive products for very few likes or other return.

Over the years I have helped a lot of businesses create contests on Facebook and I’ve learned something every time. As with any social media marketing endeavour, success comes from good planning, management and follow-up. So, without further ado, here are my seven top tips for companies that want to build a successful promotional campaign on Facebook.

If you're running a promotion on Facebook “because it’s fun” or because all of your competitors are doing it, it’s time for you to go back to the drawing board and rethink your campaign. Your contest should somehow contribute to a business goal for your company. Do you want to reach more relevant fans? Do you want to increase social media engagement with customer? Drive more sales? Decide on a goal that contributes to your wider business strategy, then decide what your goal is worth to you and create a budget that fits.

Say your goal is to drive more likes to your page and each like is worth $5 to you. If the prize will cost you $100, then you will need to get 20 new likes to recoup this cost. Don’t forget set-up costs; you will also need to consider the cost of your Facebook App (more on that later) and any advertising you plan to support your contest on Facebook.

How you calculate what your goal is worth will be unique for your company, but the important thing is that you have a goal and that you can easily measure the success of your contest.

2. Create a simple and shareable contest application

A competition on Facebook needs to be located in an application (read Facebook’s Pages terms if you have not already done so). Whatever choice you make, make sure that you end up with a contest that fans can easily understand and that encourages them to share. Consider four popular types:

A simple “Motivate and Win” contest with a Like-gate, where the components of the contest application are available only to users who like your Page. These are useful if your aim is to grow your Facebook community.

A contest with a few questions, the answers to which users can find the answers on your website. These are especially useful if your goal is to drive traffic to your website.

A competition in which the user needs to vote on other users’ contributions. These usually generate a lot of buzz and get a lovely viral spread as well.

A competition offering a prize to people who share your content. These can be very effective in increasing awareness of your offerings.

The key here is to keep it simple and give the user the ability (and incentive) to share the contest on Facebook with their friends.

3. Ensure your contest on Facebook is accessible on mobile devices

Many Facebook users access the site on mobile devices, so running a competition on Facebook that only works on desktop is a big no-no. Make sure your content on Facebook is accessible to everyone; use a webpage to store your contest on Facebook that can be accessed via mobile apps. You don’t want to risk making your mobile followers sour on you, or lose all mobile users, just because your application doesn’t work on mobile devices!

4. Regularly post about the contest on Facebook

If nobody knows about your contest on Facebook, nobody will participate. Make sure all of your followers and their friends know about the contest by publishing new posts at least 2 – 3 times per week. Offer images of the prize and describe what you can do with it, ask users to participate, and include other calls to action to get more followers to participate in the contest. You can also change your cover photo and point users to your contest. Facebook recently changed its guidelines allowing you to include calls to actions in your cover photo.

5. Promote the contest on your website, in newsletters and through ads

Just because you’re hosting your contest on Facebook doesn’t mean that Facebook should be the only place where you promote it. Add links and banners to your website to make sure visitors are informed about the contest on Facebook and include information on it in your customer newsletters. You can also use other social media apps and create buzz across multiple channels. You never know, the winner may be somebody that hasn't previously liked your Facebook page, they may have been solely a Twitter follower but after seeing the competition promoted on Twitter decided to engage with you on Facebook too. In my experience, advertising on Facebook has been crucial for contests – just make sure that your ads are targeting the right audience (e.g. do not target Italians if your prize is in the US) and try to use multiple ad formats to see which delivers the best results.

6. Send your congratulations to the winner

When the contest is over, you should show the joy that the contest gave all participants and/or winners. You might, for example, take a picture of the lucky winner and publish it on your timeline. (Just keep in mind that, according to Facebook’s Promotion Guidelines, you can’t notify a winner using the Facebook platform). Also consider talking to the winner or some of the participants to get their feedback on the contest, and then use that feedback in posts and for a future contest on Facebook.

When you have done all the above, it’s time to become a “number nerd.” Measure progress toward the goals you picked in Step 1 and how well the contest contributed to your business goals. Check Facebook Insights to see how many people visited your contest, how many more likes you received during the contest period, how your reach was affected during the contest, and so on. Make sure you understand what contributed to the success of your contest, and think about what you can do differently the next time around. Then it’s time to start planning for the next contest on Facebook. 😉

To sum things up, set a goal, create a plan, build an app with shareable content, let the world know about your contest, and keep it simple and fun.

Are there any good tips I missed for running a successful contest on Facebook? Add a comment below!

Want more Facebook marketing tips? Like us on Facebook!

7 Tips for a Successful Contest on Facebook

You wouldn’t copy and paste a competitor’s press release, would you? So why do your PR job listings look the same as theirs? And the same as a hundred other PR job descriptions? Maybe it’s time to get the PR team more involved in crafting a compelling job description that better fits your brand.

Start by Introducing Your Brand Differentiator

Your job description is more than a checklist of attributes you are looking for in a prospective employee. It’s also your pitch to candidates on why they should work for you and not one of your competitors.

The best job descriptions start by setting the stage for who the company is, what their high-level vision is, and how the PR team—and this specific role—help bring that vision to life.

Here are two examples of companies doing this right:

Facebook’s recent PR Director job listing does a good job of selling the candidate on the company, then describing who will thrive in the role.

This PR and Communications Manager job from Telenav does a good job introducing their company and painting the picture of who their ideal candidate is, and the impact their work will make.

While it is important for a candidate to have a clear understanding of the role and its requirements, some job descriptions go too far. If a page of the listing is all job duties, you can cause one of two problems to arise:

Female candidates, who may not feel they are already qualified to do 100% of the activities listed may not apply.

Applicants may get the impression you’ve combined several roles into one, to get more work for less salary.

Instead of an endless bulleted list of job requirements and responsibilities, consider giving a picture of a day-in-the-life for a person in this role. This allows the candidate to put themselves into the picture and visualize how they could contribute in the role.

When business owners note the difficulty they have in finding qualified candidates, it’s not always just a lack of good applicants that’s the issue. Is your hiring process like this: solicit resumes → run them through an applicant screening tool → schedule phone interviews → schedule in-person interviews → make a job offer?

Applicant screening tools can be an effective way to winnow down the number of applicants you manually evaluate. But they are only as good as the data used to set up their filters. If you instead build in a screening process into the job listing itself, you can cut down on the number of irrelevant applicants while giving your team more information to use in evaluating the candidate.

For an entry-level PR position, the screening process could include requesting that they submit a cover letter that includes what interests them most about working in a PR role for your company, and what they’d like to learn from the position. For a more senior PR professional, you could ask for the cover letter to include a brief summary of the PR campaign they’re most proud of and the results it drove for the company.

If someone is applying for every job that has PR in the title, including a specific screening question in your job listing can help weed out applicants who aren’t actually interested in your company. This also will weed out applicants who lack the attention to detail necessary in corporate communications. And as a bonus, including a question that illuminates the skills necessary for being successful in the position, gives candidates the ability to show they know their stuff instead of being judged exclusively on their resume-writing ability.

If you’re recycling the same PR job listings you’ve been using for the past five years, it’s making your PR team look dated. And that’s not how you’ll attract the best and brightest PR pros to your team.

Before posting your next job listing, talk to the team members who will work with this person and ask how the role has changed since the last time you recruited for it. It’s likely that the technology you use has changed, as have many of the day-to-day responsibilities and team interdependencies.

If the most recent person in the role is leaving amicably, you can ask for feedback on the job requirements as part of their exit interview. After all, who is more acutely aware of the challenges of the role than the person who has most recently been in it? That said, understand this feedback may sometimes say more about the outgoing employee than the role itself. It’s important to make sure to clarify and validate their feedback before making significant changes to the job listing.

Hiring the right candidate for your PR team can be tough. But if you follow these tips, you’ll create a job requisition that will do the heavy lifting for you, and help match the right candidates to the job.

And given that the state of PR has changed in the last decade, make sure your candidates have the digital skills to accompany their soft skills and culture fit. Download our ebook on digital competency for the modern PR pro.

How to Draft a PR Job Description That Fits Your Brand

 Social media is the perfect vehicle to leverage and positively impact website traffic, that is, when social platforms are used correctly.

The golden rule in marketing is getting the right message, to the right person, at the right time. Although many of us comms pros usually live by this notion, we also sometimes forget that while the core message remains the same, how it’s communicated needs to be tweaked depending on the channel it’s distributed on. Sure a one size fits all approach makes our life easier when it comes to content creation, but the same can’t be said when it comes to improving results.

Radio content doesn’t work for TV. TV content doesn’t work for social media. Social content doesn’t work for print. You need to create content for social media in order to see ROI from social posts and stop trying to fit the content you already have on channels they’ve not been created for.

“At Meltwater, we’re seeing an increase in clients adopting social-first content strategies in order to drive website traffic. A social-first content strategy considers social media during the ideation and brainstorm phase of planning content, rather than as an afterthought to amplify content reach. This has proved to be a successful method for those wanting to increase link click-throughs on social media”

With this in mind, here are 10 tips to remember when sharing content on social media. Follow them and increase link click-throughs in no time!

Don’t fall into the trap of trying to create and share web content across all social channels. You’re not going to increase link click-throughs via social media if you’re audience aren’t present on the channel. Use a social listening tool to understand where your audience hangs out as this will aid channel prioritisation and focus. You can do this by analysing social conversations about your brand per channel.

Social listening insights will stop you from leaning towards a channel you want to be present on and more towards the channel you should be present on.

“Conduct social listening of conversations developing around your industry/ competitors too. You may find a difference in social network usage, suggesting where your brand’s audience may be to heading to next! Untapped social media channels offer a chance to reach new audiences and increase click-throughs from unique website visitors.”

Although we’re seeing social networks mimic their rival’s technologies (like Instagram rolling out Snap’s Stories), each social network is still fundamentally different from one another. The unique characteristics must be respected when sharing web content on social media if you have any chance of driving web traffic.

The image below from AddThis offers a high-level overview of the differences between social network content and tone of voice.

Let’s take Twitter vs Instagram as an example.

Twitter defines itself as “what’s happening in the world and what people are talking about right now.” It’s a platform for real-time commentary, sparking global conversations. Instagram, on the other hand, defines itself as “a simple, fun & creative way to capture, edit & share photos, videos & messages with friends & family”.

One channel relies on imagery and the other relies on text.

If you’re aiming to increase click-throughs on Twitter, consider the ‘chatter factor’. Will your content spark debate? How can you take the conversation from Twitter onto your web page? For example, prompting people to continue the conversation in the comment section of your webpage works nicely.

When creating content for Insta, consider the ‘shopability factor’. Is the photo attractive enough to not just generate likes, but get people to click on your microsite and explore?
Due to the real-time nature of Twitter, it’s best to post timely content. Newsjacking, moment marketing, company announcements, customer service campaigns and crisis control responses are forms of content that work well for Twitter and will most likely increase link click-throughs compared to other forms of content. On the contrary, evergreen content, that always remains relevant, works better on Facebook.

If you want somebody to explore your post beyond the caption your need to spark audience emotion. The best way to do this is through storytelling. This can be tricky with limited characters, so get creative and look at what others are doing in your industry. Most companies find evoking the below emotions significantly impact engagement and increase link click-through.

85 % of Facebook video is watched without sound, yet in a recent Facebook study, 76% of rated video adverts required sound to be understood. When creating video content to be distributed on social media, ensure the narrative can be followed through imagery, without sound. Add subtitles to increase link click-throughs and post engagement. Check out Facebook’s handy closed-captioning tool which allows you to upload your own captions or generate captions automatically.

When creating content for social media, professionals are in a unique position to arm themselves with more informed engagement insights. For example, they’re able to understand when people click a link, the pages they explore next or when they drop off their site. Social listening to conversations developing around competitors can also give you an insight scoop into the strengths and weaknesses of their strategies. Such insights should be used to A/B test content with optimisation in mind.

The majority of social networks offer native analytics for business accounts within the app, but if you’re interested in more advanced insights, such as trending themes, consider investing in a third party social media analytics tool to help increase link click-throughs.

Don’t forget that image sizing differs by channel. Nothing will detract your audience from clicking a link to your site than an accompanying image that has been cut off as this signifies content that has been poorly put together. You can find the 2018 guide to social media image dimensions here. If you think the content will resonate on other social networks (keeping in mind their unique characteristics) you can easily adjust content sizing using free tools like Canva.

It’s also important to optimise content for mobile users, especially since 80% of social media usage is consumed via mobile. Increase link click-throughs by considering the user experience of engaging with content via a smaller screen vertically, but also the behavioural differences of mobile vs desktop users.

No comms message is complete without a strong call to action (CTA). CTAs are crucial when trying to increase link click-throughs.

“Every piece of content, regardless of what channel it’s distributed on, should have a goal it wants the audience to complete. However, CTAs should be adapted depending on the channel and its characteristics.”

If the aim of the campaign is to double marketing database subscribers, you may want to push this through a timely competition for Twitter. On the contrary, since Facebook supports evergreen content quite nicely, its better database sign-ups through whitepaper downloads for this particular channel.

We often have clients ask “When is the best time to post on social media?” Unfortunately, the answer isn’t as simple as Sunday at 6 pm (despite what people may think).

“The best time to post on social media and increase link click-throughs depends on the time your audience is online on a given social network. This means the best time to post on differs by channel and communities.”

Work out when the best time to post on social media is by looking at what times and days you get the most engagement on social media currently.

For Twitter, go into ‘Twitter Analytics’ and sort by ‘Top Tweets’, you can then look at your top tweets. Analyse which time and day get the most engagement.

For Facebook, go into ‘Insights’ of your page, to look at what days you get the most reach and likes.

On Instagram, if you have a business profile, you can look at Instagram’s analytics feature.

Rolling out a social-first content strategy doesn’t mean creating content for social media only. Marketing campaigns that produce high website traffic tend to be created with integration across all marcomms channels in mind. Customer experiences should be seamless, no matter where the message is viewed. With so many people multi-screening, the chances of your audience coming across the message on different channels (not just social media) is high. An integrated approach ensures consistency and maximum message impact.

10 Tips to Increase Link Click-Throughs on Social Media

In this blog, Rob Ashwell, from Fourteen Comms, sets the context as to why we shouldn’t be using advertising value equivalent (AVE) as a measurement of public relations value and campaign success. AVE is a controversial topic in the PR world. Find out why he thinks social shares may be a better way to analyze, measure and evaluate the success of your campaigns. 

What to use Instead of Advertising Value equivalent (AVE)

Read most PR blogs and you’ll see that evaluation is a significant buzz word in PR circles. As an industry, we (mostly) know that we shouldn’t be using advertising value equivalents as a tool for evaluation. But that isn’t stopping us.

A study by PR Week / the PRCA showed 35% of agencies were still using the AVE metric. As were 23% of in-house teams. But other data suggests these figures are likely to be far too low and PR evaluation is, in fact, rarer than many, such as the PRCA and Amec, would hope.

In 2016, research found 83,000 people worked in the UK’s, and 226,000 in the US’ public relations industry’. So, according to Google AdWords, how many searches for “PR evaluation” are made in all English speaking nations each month? 210.

Google Trends (which gives relative Google search volumes) backs this figure up with a highly erratic graph of weekly searches – and if your marketing and PR teams ask the tool to break this down by region it simply says “Hmm, your search doesn’t have enough data to show here.”

Fig 1: Given there are more than 300,000 PRs in the US and UK and two-thirds of these (in the UK at least) have ditched AVE as a reliable metric, why are so few searching for new analytics and ways to evaluate public relations value?

So if advertising value equivalents aren't right for PR measurement, what is? 

How can your PR and marketing teams use Meltwater’s media intelligence tool to start to evaluate results and plan what has the greatest likelihood of working?

Meltwater alerts PR and marketing pros to new coverage as well as allows them to search retrospectively. This makes it a great starting point when analysing a campaign, or planning for your next one. 

Now, it should be said up front, coverage is not an end goal. Editorial volume is just a step towards creating awareness. AVE has been widely discredited as an evaluation metric. In my work for clients, I often see more traffic come from a niche title such as EE Times (Engineering) or Bicycling than from a national paper or from TV. Rather than just looking at quantity or reach, we should bring in a range of data points for example website traffic, social media shares or sentiment. 

For example – wire services can guarantee PR coverage on huge publications, but is this coverage worth the fee?

This question can be answered nicely using PR measurement insights from a simple Meltwater search. In the graph below you can see the number of shares of wire coverage vs the number of shares on editorial coverage. This lack of reaction to paid for wire coverage indicates that in many cases, other activities will deliver a great return on investment.  

Fig 2: If a wire distributes a press release and nobody cares enough to share it, does it justify its fee or does it depend on the context of the the example?

Data is from a Meltwater search on the term “Semiconductor” over a three month period. Share analysis was performed via Shared Count (Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Stumble)

How to measure the value of social shares

Social share is not always perfect as a metric (see below), but then again neither is AVE. Social shares are a way to quantify how many people have reacted to coverage (and therefore a campaign).

Most social networks’ APIs let public relations and marketing teams analyze and measure the number of likes and comments. For example, most news sites such as the Guardian show how many times a story has been shared. 

There are several free tools that track shares from a URL. Meltwater helps you both measure PR coverage over time and gives a total share count for any given press release, just by pasting in its URL.

Alternatively, if you’re working off a Meltwater coverage list for an entire year’s coverage you can use services such as SharedCount. You can measure more than one URL at a time – however it only tracks Facebook, Pinterest and StumbleUpon shares. You can then cross-reference the shares in Excel or Google Sheets (tip the v-lookup function allows you to do this – see image below for example).

Being in a spreadsheet you can then easily manipulate the data to pull out key time periods, key influencers or other key trends graphically. Note: if you’re a Meltwater client, you can view key trends, key time periods and key influencers within the tool. 

One project we did last year helped an agency client to understand how to best prepare for a major product launch using PR measurement insights. Their client was one of the product’s two distributors. We used Meltwater to identify all PR coverage from a previous product launch. By analysing editorial coverage and shares, we were able to discover potential media targets, and when to time our promotion. 

We broke it down in several ways to identify media targets and activity to prioritise. But, one of the key elements showed that the type of PR coverage and the publication it appeared in was less important than timing, with distributor 2 getting more (but later) coverage, but distributor 1 getting the shares (and as we’ll see in part 2, Google searches too).

Similarly to advertising value equivalents, it should be noted that using shares alone as an evaluation tool has weaknesses.

Firstly, people are less likely to share something if it doesn’t put them in a good light. In the same way photos on Instagram never represent real life, nor do shares. This limitation can be seen in the circulation and share figures of the National Enquirer tabloid and Atlantic magazine.

Both publications have roughly the same readership figures and the same number of monthly Google searches, yet the highbrow Atlantic gets 27 times the article shares of the lowbrow tabloid. Whether the reason is fear of being ridiculed by friends, or desire to make yourself look ‘better’, the limitation can cause a title to appear more/less influential than it actually is. 

Its second weakness is that share count alone doesn’t give a sentiment. Too many replies (rather than likes) and it’s likely a sign that people are speaking negatively. This rule of thumb is called The Ratio and is based on the fact it takes more effort to write something than click a button. As Luke O’Neil more succinctly wrote in Esquire “The lengthier the conversation [from the post] the surer it is that someone royally messed up,”. This is particularly worth bearing in mind for crisis comms. 

Blend a range of data points to build up a full picture of your media coverage. For example, share counts, sentiment and reach. 

Rob Ashwell has worked in PR since 2002 and through Fourteen Comms helps agencies and companies evaluate what has worked and how to make their budget go further.

There's no denying that PR evaluation has come along way in the past 10 years, much to the joy of communication professionals who previously felt that researching whether their PR efforts moved the needle was an uphill batter. Communication pros now have a variety of analytic tools to add to their kit to help them prove PR ROI.

Hopefully by now you have a better understanding of alternative methods you can use to analyze and measure the value of your PR, asides for advertising value equivalent. By measuring the metrics that matter, it's a lot easier to tie PR strategy success back to overall business goals.

What to use Instead of AVE – Shares

If you’re like me you’ve noticed your social media feeds are flooded with #MeToo statements, stories, and voices. While it’s sad to think of the number of women who have been impacted by sexual violence, it’s also empowering to know that so many feel brave enough to share their voice via #MeToo. Sexual harassment and assault has been placed front and centre from both female and male perspectives, in essence encompassing a Me too-You too-We too-She too-He too dialogue. If anything positive came out of the Harvey Weinstein floodgates it’s that more people than ever are taking to social platforms to shine a light on sexual harassment and assault. Let’s dig into the social data of these #MeToo voices to see a more in-depth picture of its impact.

First, let’s look at the timeline of the #MeToo campaign using the Meltwater media intelligence platform. On Sunday, October 15 at 12 pm there were 295 mentions of #MeToo on Twitter and at 10 pm there were over 83k mentions.

Tarana Burke, an activist, creator of Just Be Inc., and sexual assault survivor has been empowering young women through ‘Me Too’ since 2007. Tarana’s efforts for awareness were brought to the forefront when celebrities joined what Tarana has been saying for years. On Sunday, Alyssa Milano advocated for awareness and unity for those who have been victimized by sexual harassment and assault by urging her followers to reply to her tweet with ‘Me Too’ if they had ever been sexually violated or harassed. Her tweet originated at 4:21 PM on Sunday, October 15 and as of Tuesday morning, her tweet had received over 22k retweets and 60k replies.

Below is a look at the life of this particular tweet. To better understand the tweet life metrics let me briefly explain how these work and what knowledge we can gather from this type of metric. The half-life metric shows the virality of the tweet. It allows us to see the elapsed time between the original tweet and the retweet that represents the middle-point of the total spread. Keep in mind that the maximum number of retweets analyzed is 1k. Of the 1k retweets sampled we can look at the time that passed between the original tweet and it’s 500th retweet, giving us the half-life results. Using Milano’s tweet, the 500th retweet came almost 11.5 hours after the original tweet. The 80% life, which is the 800th retweet came 1 day after the original was post.

Another important metric of the tweet life is max depth, it helps you understand where the majority of the retweets originated and what their impact is. You can see if a retweet was from your follower, or by followers of your followers and so forth. The depth levels increase when a retweet comes from someone outside of the retweeters’ network. Milano’s particular tweet has a max depth of 5, meaning that at some point during the tweet life this tweet reached 5 levels, showing that the tweet had a high impact.

Alyssa Milano’s tweet garnered even more awareness from actresses in Hollywood including Lady Gaga and Reese Witherspoon. Through social data you can see the shift that Milano and others had hoped for, people were using social media as a way to unmask what so many women carry day-to-day. The #MeToo conversation allowed them to have a voice that focused on them without any distractions or having to go into detail.

It’s also important to see that the voices of #MeToo are global. While 56% of the conversation is being driven from the US, it’s also being discussed in places like South Africa, India, and Mexico.

Additionally, it’s not just women talking about it either, men are chiming in on their experiences as well and offering support. Using the Meltwater media intelligence solution we can see that between October 11-17 there has been 1.2M mentions of #MeToo by 950k users. When considering the number of mentions we can see that roughly 70% of the people talking about #MeToo are women, which means the other 30% of the mentions are coming from men.

Below are some tweets from men discussing sexual violence and raising awareness as well.

Jensen Ackles on Twitter: "For my wife, for my daughters, for all women...I stand with all of you.  This has gotta change.  #metoo #nomore"

HeForShe on Twitter: "Now more than ever, we need #HeForShe men to step up. #MeToo… "

The conversation has a fierce start on social platforms, but where does it go from here? Taking a sensitive, yet relevant topic and looking at it through the lens of social data allows us to keenly see what is unfolding inside and outside of the hashtag. These two small, but mighty words- ‘Me Too’- are holding the weight and carrying the voice of many. May the momentum continue.

#MeToo – How One Tweet Inspired a Movement

You’ve probably heard that your key performance indicators, or KPIs, should play a big role in the creation of your marketing budget. They tell you where to put your dollars to make the most impact— the biggest bang for your buck, so to speak. But. There’s SO MUCH DATA, it’s tough to tell what’s actually useful, and what you can ignore. How do you know which KPIs have the greatest value, and should be used to create that all-important budget?

Ok. You’re sifting to find the most important KPIs by funnel stage. Where do you start?

If you haven’t embraced the concept of “smarketing,” or the alignment of your sales and marketing teams, it’s time to get on board. It’s the best combo since chocolate and peanut butter, and it will help you generate the most revenue possible. Once you’ve brought the team together, break down the customer buying process into three stages:

Why? Well, it’s a lot easier to break down the KPIs by stage; looking at all of them en masse can be overwhelming, and you might end up falling down a KPI rabbit hole, never to be heard from again. Nobody wants that.

Instead, examine the KPIs as they pertain to each stage in the process. Buyers at every stage have very different needs, and the KPIs should reflect that.

Today, we’ll look at the KPIs you need in the first stage of the buyer’s journey: Awareness. Over the next two articles, we’ll discuss the KPIs for the Consideration and Decision stages— we don’t want you to feel like you’re drinking from an information fire hose.

We’re going to break down the data into three questions:

Here’s the good news. You have a lot of excellent sources for data. And here’s the bad news. There are A LOT of excellent sources for data. How do you know what actually pertains to your specific needs? Here’s a quick primer.

How many visitors do you get every month? Which pages are visited most frequently? These questions can help you get a good feel for the “hot spots” on your website. You can gather this information through tools such as Google Analytics or Hubspot; tools such as these are definitely worth exploring, as they make analytics a breeze.

Another factor to consider is the performance of your calls to action. Are they bringing folks to the pages they’re touting? And how long do people spend on those pages? What do they do while they’re there? Tools like Hotjar offer an in-depth analysis of how people use your website, and what their engagement behaviors look like. This tool is essentially a “heatmap” of your website, giving you a visual representation of the most popular places on your website.

Social media isn’t just for cat videos and pictures of your high school sweetheart’s baby anymore. It’s a valuable (and cost-effective) marketing tool, but only if you track your success. It’s important that you answer these questions:

How many people see your posts every month?

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