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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

When you set out to work on a PR campaign, you may be excited to jump right in and produce results. But, strategy is the key to success for any serious initiative—helping drive results as well as set expectations.

A great place to start your research is competitive benchmarking. It not only gives you a great perspective on what’s giong on in your industry, but guides you in uncovering untapped opportunities, differentiating yourself from rivals, and setting ambitious–but realistic—goals.

Why Competitive Benchmarking Is Important in PR

By benchmarking the level and quality of your brand’s media awareness against competitors, you’ll enter a new campaign armed with the information you need to measure effectiveness.

“The desired outcome is to learn which processes lead to greater success in order to improve your company’s performance,” says Sandra Fathi, president of Affect.

By gauging where things stand when you begin, you’ll be able to track success (or failure) as you go. Not only will you be able to report on whether you’ve gained a competitive edge through your efforts, but you’ll be able to keep up with key PR KPIs. Measuring things like spikes in website traffic in conjunction with earned media coverage; or the number of prospects who get in touch because they saw an article about your company; or the growth in social media followers or interactions, you’ll be able to report on the impact your efforts are having.

By setting up a competitor dashboard in your media intelligence platform—where you compare your share of voice, reach, and coverage numbers to your competitors—you can keep an eye on results. Doing so enables you to change course if you need to. Ultimately you’ll draw data from this dashboard to report results.

“Looking to your competitors to learn not only what they’re doing well, but what you might want to avoid, can help guide your next move,” said Lauren Cranston, PR manager for Skyword. “It isn’t enough to track just your own performance—competitive analytics can make or break everything you thought you knew.”

“Benchmarking is important because PR is actually a competitive function—and because all inputs-outputs-outtakes-outcomes are considered in the context of a market,” says Alan Kelly, founder and CEO of Playmaker Systems. 

While much of public relations measurement seems to revolve around the number of press releases written or the number of pitches sent, benchmarking lets you focus on the results you’ve achieved, rather than the effort you’ve made.

“Perhaps the most valuable aspect of the benchmarking process is that it only charts achieved success (earned media coverage), rather than simply listing or summarizing all monthly PR activities—the number of news releases distributed, columns written, interviews conducted or time spent ‘pitching’ stories to the media and following up pitches,” says Len Stein of Hubspot.

“Yes, all of these are gauges of PR activity, but when the rubber hits the road, it’s all about success for the client, rather than the water carried.”

So how do you effectively benchmark a PR campaign? Parameters can be broad or narrow, depending on your goals. You can also include other departments in the effort, to ensure you get as much out of the benchmarking as possible.

Fathi gives this example for using benchmarking to build PR strategy and report on success:

Objectives could include things like: 
Build and maintain Brand X’s position as a thought leader on a given topic.
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With results in hand you can validate what you’re already doing, while looking to see where opportunities lie.

“Don’t be afraid to learn you’re wrong,” Fathi says. “Don’t be afraid to change course.”

Benchmarking can be used to demonstrate ROI when compared to true business metrics. Leverage the findings to gain C-Suite support for your strategy, budget, headcount, and resources.

As Fathi suggests, “Measure what matters to the C-Suite and present the data in a way they’ll understand it.”

For a more detailed insight into competitor benchmarking check out our dedicated blog.

The Importance of Competitive Benchmarking in PR Strategy

It's one thing to jump into Facebook marketing, but seeing ROI from the content you share on social media is another thing. I'm sure marketers have many questions floating around their head, from how many users see the posts from my Facebook Page each month to which are my best posts etc?

In this blog post, we will go through four key Facebook metrics that you should be measuring with your social media analytics tool. Be sure to benchmark the metrics on a regular basis so you can optimise and yield better results! 

4 Facebook Metrics Every Company Should be Measuring

Woohoo! Yesterday we reached 5,000 likes.
Tell all your friends to like us!
Like us and win a snowmobile!

I see these types of posts from Pages in my News Feed all the time and I’m always confused by them. Why, you may ask? Because your Business Page’s number of likes means nothing if your fans aren’t engaging with you. There are way more important Facebook strategy metrics that you should be measuring other than likes. In this blog post, I will provide you with four metrics that I think all companies on Facebook should measure in order to prove the results of their marketing efforts.

In Insights, you can see how many users your Page and your posts have reached. From the “Page” tab, navigate to “Post Reach” to see the number of users your posts reached. Scroll down a bit to see your Total Reach, or the number of users who have seen your Page or any posts associated with it.

It’s also important to know which posts, in particular, have the best reach so that you can post more like them. This type of insight if vital for your future content marketing strategy. To get this data, click on the “Posts” tab and sort by reach. Take a look at the posts with the best reach and try to post more like them.

Facebook uses an algorithm, consisting of millions factors, that determines which posts appear in users’ News Feeds, and a strong factor in this algorithm is engaged users. In the “Posts” tab, you can see the number of users who have engaged with your posts – meaning that they clicked, liked, commented on, or shared your update. As more audience members engage with your posts, Facebook will show your updates to more of your fans.

So, make sure you know which of your posts engage the most users, and post more like them to increase your reach.

I don’t like to track the number of likes as I feel it's a vanity metric, but at the same time, I do feel that it’s important to track when I receive new likes and when I loose audience members. This data tells me when my content marketing strategy is doing something good and when I’m doing something bad.

To access this data, go to the “Page” tab and take a look at the “Net Likes” graph, which shows you how many new likes and unlikes you had each day. Take a closer look at the dates where you’ve gained or lost a lot of likes to see what you did those days and take note.

You should experiment with your Facebook posts to find what types of content work best for your Page and followers. But by experimenting you will also take some chances and might receive negative feedback. To get this data, go to the “Posts” tab and navigate to “Post Hides, Hides of All Posts, Reports of Spam, Unlikes of Page”.

Under Engagement you will see the total number of users who have given your post negative feedback. Click on each post to see what kind of negative feedback that post has received.

Keep in mind that negative feedback does not necessarily mean that you posted something bad. When you publish a post that has a lot of engagement, it will reach users that do not already like your page – which can increase your negative feedback. Look at the positive and negative feedback together to determine if you’re posting something your fans don’t like.

There are lots of interesting Facebook metrics that marketers can use to take their strategy to new heights; this blog post only touches on the most common and important ones. Facebook metrics should be analyzed on a regular basis to give you the information that you need to reach and engage more users.

Do you have any other Facebook metrics that you frequently take a closer look at? Let me know in the comments section below.

Want more Facebook marketing tips? Like us on Facebook!

Meltwater

Big changes have happened to Instagram over the past couple of years which significantly change how social media marketing is done. Find out what advantages they bring to social media pros and how to apply these changes to your social media strategy. To ensure you're equipped with all the info you need, we invited Erica Jenkins, the head of product from Meltwater Social, to break it all down.

User privacy has been a hot topic in recent years, but this was especially the case in 2018. From GDPR to Cambridge Analytica, social media platforms have had to reevaluate their social data policies and make adjustments, impacting brands who rely on follower and community data for their social media intelligence strategy. Throughout 2018, Facebook and Instagram changed and limited what types of information can be accessed by social media analytics providers like Meltwater. They also deprecated several capabilities marketing teams depended on for accessing user-generated content.

But fear not—with some preparation, your social team can leverage these changes as a competitive advantage. Use this post as a guide to understand what changed and what steps your marketing department can take to continue to safeguard your brand and the success of your social media marketing strategy.

Instagram Marketing for Business: What this means for you

In order to protect personal information, only verified business profiles on Instagram are allowed to search for hashtags or track and analyze the activity of other verified business profiles. The verification process, which includes linking a Facebook profile with an Instagram account, signals that you are opting in for public information to be shared about your business profile with others.

Prior to these changes, social media listening across Instagram would work with any type of account - business or not. Now, you need to have a verified business account—which requires more forethought. If you’re a marketing pro working for a global brand with many country-level pages on Facebook, it might make sense to create an Instagram handle for each country. This would provide you with a larger number of accounts to power larger volumes of follower and community data because each handle is allowed 30 active hashtags, so the social media marketing strategy of one handle might not be best in the long term.

One of the shifts in accessing public Instagram data is the limits on the number of hashtags you can search to prevent abuse of your followers and wider social media community's personal information. Verified Instagram business profiles may search up to 30 hashtags at a given time (or, to be more precise, during a rolling, seven-day period). This new hashtag search limit applies to your entire business profile account—across all apps, no matter the service or administrator.

Instagram requires this social media data only to be used for your business purposes. These hashtags also apply over a set period, giving you sampled data over time. But working with a social intelligence solution can give you an advantage. Meltwater’s database, for example, saves user-defined hashtag content for clients, which they can access at any time for historical analysis or exporting—and provides greater transparency to other users in your organization.

Verified social media business accounts also have the ability to track Instagram posts by other businesses that have verified their Instagram accounts, such as competitors or industry influencers. This example will allow you to understand what your competitors are promoting to engage their followers. It's also wise to approach influencers in the same manner. Take a look at what they're sharing and what engages their followers the most. If you notice alignment in what their community is interested in versus what interests your followers, the influencer may be a welcomed tool to boost your social media marketing efforts.

Shifting social media marketing strategies and scenarios

These changes to Instagram affect the entire social media community—from service providers to marketing teams. However, this new normal can benefit your social strategy while still respecting users’ privacy. Below we've included a few ways marketers can still use insights from Instagram users to get ahead.

If you want to capture a broad range of content, use terms such as #travel or #vacation if you were a hospitality brand, as an example. This gives your marketing department an understanding of a breadth of topical or industry content. From there you can leverage Meltwater keyword search against the content to find out how mauch share of voice your brand has. This tactic can also help guide your content marketing strategy.

If you are running a social media campaign and your marketing team wants as much focused follower and community data as possible, you can continue to search for the hashtag you’re promoting (just be mindful of your 30 hashtag limit). Under the new privacy measures, marketing pros won’t be able to see the authors’ names or any information about them, but they’ll see the full text and images or videos.

Additional use case is competitive or industry monitoring. Brands should be looking at how their competitors use the rich visual media tools to speak about their products or drive customer engagement. Are their new products being launched which could cause competitive intrusion? Are your competitors co-promoting with another company? How does your competitor position themselves on Facebook vs. Instagram? Such insights are critical for strategic marketing decision making.

A new option, previously not possible in the legacy API, is searching for tags and @mentions of your social media handle. This will allow social media marketing pros to find out how users are talking about their brand—regardless of a hashtag—so they can engage in the conversation with a comment to their post. This capability opens loads of opportunities for brands to demonstrate their social savvy and brand values, such as commitment to customer service.

Verify your business account: The most important step your marketing team can take is to ensure your Instagram business profile is properly linked to your Facebook page and verified. The little blue checkmark isn’t enough to ensure you’re able to search for hashtags or competitors. The next step is to verify.

Hashtag management plan: Each Instagram business profile will be limited to 30 hashtag search requests, so take a moment to examine internal processes for your marketing. Understand who in your organization needs to scan Instagram hashtags, and collaborate to determine your organization’s “30.” Remember this limit applies to each of the tools your marketing team use connected to your business profile to conduct hashtag searches (such as Meltwater, Sysomos, Sprout Social, etc.)

You can perform unlimited searches on the content posted by other verified accounts, including your competitors or industry players. Keep @mentions vs. hashtags in mind when creating your hashtag management plan.

Again, these changes are industry-wide, so while you may feel that they're a little restricting for your marketing department, your competitors are feeling the same. No matter which vendors you use, these preparations will be required for compliant Instagram access.

Need help? Want to spar your social media marketing strategy to make sure it's compliant? Meltwater clients can reach out to our Help Desk, or log in and ask questions via live chat about Meltwater Social and the social intelligence solutions we offer.

Instagram for Business: What Changed with the API?

It’s the end of the month again, and every marketer knows what that means: end-of-month reporting. It feels like just yesterday we were knee-deep in numbers and charts and graphs trying to sort through the data and make sense of it all. Why is inbound marketing reporting so important, anyway? Why do we spend so much time analyzing? Because it connects the dots between our marketing activities and the goals we set out to accomplish. It can help us draw conclusions from our tests, learn from our mistakes, and spot opportunities to replicate success. Inbound marketing reporting can also help us prove the ROI of inbound marketing efforts and eliminate wasteful activity.

Simply put: Proper inbound marketing reporting gives us a blueprint for success when it comes to growing business through inbound marketing activity. But you don’t have to wait until the end of the month to start. Here are some ideas for breaking your reporting down into daily, weekly, and monthly analysis to help you keep better tabs on your inbound marketing activity.

For more information on the inbound methodology, how to apply it toward growing your business, and how to track your success, download The Growth Hacking Cheat Sheet: Plan, Execute, See Results.

In the meantime, here’s what you can be reporting on daily, weekly, and monthly to grow your business:

While you shouldn’t get yourself tied up in too much reporting on a daily basis, it’s good to get in the habit of checking in on a few activities to make sure things are going smoothly. Set a few minutes aside every day to take a quick glance at the following items:

Website traffic is the lifeblood of inbound marketing for obvious reasons—you must attract your audience to your website before converting them into leads. Taking a glance at website traffic using a tool like HubSpot or Google Analytics on a daily basis can help you monitor sudden spikes or drops in traffic.

Posting and interacting on your social media channels regularly will help you expand your marketing reach and attract visitors to your website. Research reveals that links shared on Facebook and Twitter have a shelf life of about three hours. So, generally speaking, when you post a link on social media, you’ll be able to determine how engaging that post was and how much traffic it sent to your website within 24 hours. Make checking up on your recent social media posts a morning or afternoon ritual. You can learn a lot from successful and unsuccessful posts.

Monitoring activity on a weekly basis will help ensure there are no breakdowns in performance that will affect month-over-month progress. Here are a few things to report on each week:

Glancing at website traffic on a daily basis will help you identify trends that you can circle back to weekly. Check back in to see if sudden drops in traffic have been resolved. Consider the week’s marketing activity and try to identify whether or not tactics are working like you planned. Which days performed better than others? It shouldn’t be surprising to see a bump in traffic on days when you post a blog article or send an email, but if that bump is higher than typical, make a note to yourself for monthly review.

Studies show that within one week of posting, a blog article’s traffic drops, on average, by 90 percent. When a blog article is optimized for SEO, it can build significant organic traffic over time, but check back on recent blog posts each week in the meantime to see how they performed. For articles that didn’t generate much traffic, consider the topic of the article and the audience that read the article. Does the topic speak to and help your desired audience? From the promotion strategies you used, were you able to reach the right audience?

Leads should be monitored frequently for the same reasons as traffic: to catch any drops in performance before they affect monthly goals. As your campaigns are running, check in on the number of leads you’re generating. When lead performance drops, consider your CTAs, emails, and landing pages.

Monthly performance reports help ensure that you’re hitting your goals month over month and that your marketing activities are paying off—resulting in steady growth over time. They can also inform you where to shift focus in order to get better performance from your inbound marketing efforts. Here are a few things to take a look at monthly:

Track overall website visits each month and expect to see an increase in month-over-month traffic. Track website traffic by channel to identify the activities that are working when it comes to attracting visitors. Here’s a breakdown of traffic to consider:

Organic Traffic – Organic visits from unpaid search results

Referral Traffic – Visits from another website that isn’t a search engine

Social Media Traffic – Visits from social media channels

Email Traffic – Visits from the emails that you send out

Direct Traffic – Visits from offline sources such as print advertisements or brand recognition

Paid Traffic – Visits that come from paid advertising

If month-over-month traffic happens to decrease from one month to another, you’ll be able to pinpoint the reason why by identifying channels that also decreased.

Take a look at your best and worst performing pages, including landing pages and blog articles. You’ll want to identify the pages that are not only getting the most views, but the ones that are converting well too. Make sure that the most viewed pages provide a next step for visitors to take, whether that step is to read or subscribe to the blog, download premium content, or to fill out a bottom-funnel form. Consider using prominent, action-oriented CTAs at or near the top of the page. Pinpointing traffic sources and successful CTAs for each of these pages can help you lay out a strategy to increase traffic and repeat success.

As you build out and execute marketing campaigns, don’t forget to check in monthly to see how they performed and what takeaways you can learn from. First, consider the number of campaign views, new contacts and new customers generated. Are these increasing or decreasing month-over-month? Break that performance down by channel to determine which activities had the biggest impact on recent campaign performance. This insight can help you decide where to spend most of your efforts and your budget.

Increases in website traffic month over month indicate that you’re attracting an audience. Increases in leads month over month indicate that you’re attracting the right audience and that they’re converting on your offers. Track your overall leads each month and, again, expect to see a steady increase over time.

This is the total number of visitors divided by the total number of leads. Keeping an eye on your VTL conversion rate helps you determine how effective your landing pages and offers are in converting visitors into contacts. When your VTL rate is low for the month, consider whether or not you’re bringing in the right audience to your website. Then consider how well your offers are resonating with them. A/B-test some variations to find out.

This is the total spend on marketing activities divided by the number of leads gained. Track cost per lead by channel (organic, referral, social media, email, direct, and paid) to determine which efforts are the most cost-effective and which ones could be scrapped altogether. Keep in mind that inbound marketing strategies require an investment of time and hard work before you start to see results, so measure monthly, but give it time to come to fruition.

Your inbound marketing efforts don’t truly pay off until you’ve turned your leads into customers for your business. So obviously you want to track your customers every month and (once again) which channels they’re coming from (organic, referral, social media, email, direct, and paid).

This is the total number of customers for the month divided by the total number of leads (multiplied by 100 to get the percentage). This tells you how well your leads are converting into sales. When the lead-to-customer rate is low, consider ways to nurture leads a little longer before handing off to sales.

While this breakdown of reporting is sufficient for some, it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution. 

This article originally appeared in The SmartBug Inbound Marketing Blog, was written by Mike Wolfe from Business2Community, and legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.

How to get your inbound marketing reporting off the ground

Whether you work in-house, at an agency or are servicing several clients in an independent capacity, one thing is certain – regular reporting back to your customers, be they internal or external, is a vital part of any PR manager’s job.

Taking time to quantify the ROI your activities generate, as well as reflecting on successes and shortcomings in your strategy, is a crucial component in the consummate PRO’s journey. How else are we meant to learn and develop our ideas, not to mention, validate the efficacy of our PR efforts?

The question of which metrics to address is one that comes up regularly in the PR community and is often the basis of highly-contentious debates as people argue for or against a variety of typical public relations KPIs such as AVE, impressions and social media engagement. Many agree that some traditional PR metrics are like putting lipstick on a pig – AVE, for example, is a known vanity metric which has zero bearings on the value PR adds to brands and how they are perceived by the public. It’s outdatedness as a PR metric is further exposed in the context of a shifting, digitally-powered public relations landscape where quantitative data enlightens PR people of their successes and failures.

In this post, we’ll share some different public relations metrics and tell you why they should form part of your reporting framework. While measurement is critical, it is insufficient in a silo and data is useless unless you can extract insights that offer real value – these insights are found in the dynamic cause-and-effect relationships entrenched in data. Data that enrich a report should correlate with organisational objectives and should be mappable to sustainable, real-world outcomes.

It must be noted that the indicators which follow aren’t intended as a one-size-fits-all silver bullet for PR measurement and evaluation; some apply to earned media while others are better suited for tracking the effectiveness of a content marketing campaign; all of them work in unison for more intelligent PR reporting. Here are five alternative PR metrics that should matter more in 2019 and beyond.

Placement Rate as a Metric for Measuring Pitches

Evaluating your placement rate – that is the pitches and stories you reach out with in relation to those that “land” successfully – can help you assess the effectiveness of your outreach and, if necessary, empower you to level-up your pitch strategy before you exhaust your media list on a single earned media initiative. Much like an optimisation specialist will calculate conversion rate, PRs can calculate placement rate by dividing the number of targets (media, bloggers or otherwise) they’ve pitched by the number of stories they place successfully. Placement rate is useful to gauge the performance of pitches and outreach in public relations, content marketing and earned media activities.

Share of Voice to Ascertain Your Influence

Measuring Share of Voice will help you keep your finger on the pulse of how much of the conversation your brand dominates among target audiences. It’s a useful metric for determining the value you derive from how people perceive your brand and, more importantly, it offers a practical benchmarking exercise to find out how your slice of the conversation stacks up against competitors in your field. Regular monitoring of your brand’s share of voice will give you an edge over competitors – if you see your share of voice decreasing, it could signal areas you’ve neglected to focus on.

Using the largest inventory of social media and online content in the business, Meltwater’s media intelligence tools use Share of Voice as one of the many available PR metrics, making it easy to track and manage conversations related to your brand, in real-time.

Brand Sentiment to Keep Tabs on Real Conversations

Sentiment analysis looks at the tone of media and conversations about your brand and is a reliable methodology for gauging how people feel about your brand be it positive, negative or neutral. After consolidating the brand and product mentions you create from a PR, content marketing or earned media campaign, analysis of the resultant content can help you understand your brand’s position in the overarching conversation related to your niche. Realistically, brand sentiment will never be one hundred percent positive. As such, it can be used to identify areas of improvement and linked to organisational outcomes in a way that sparks change in negative opinions about your brand, products or services.

Meltwater’s Media Intelligence tools help you combine rich digital metrics with media mentions to accurately measure how your brand resonates with your core audience.

Measuring the clarity of the stories you publish can be trickier to pin down than most PR metrics. Ultimately, effective storytelling is about making an emotional and memorable connection with the recipient; as a result, it can be difficult to be precise in gauging a target audience’s understanding of a story. Clear stories will resonate with an audience and inspire them to take a desired action, however, to measure this per initiative can make for inexact reporting which is why it’s better to take a holistic view and measure the effectiveness of a story arc and the momentum it builds over time.

In PR peoples’ panic to prove their value, historical data is often overlooked as a practical means of analysing the quality and impact of our work. Sometimes, you don’t have to look too far to take stock of your PR efforts … looking at the data you already have at your disposal is a metric which aligns with this way of thinking. Owned data is only viable as a PR metric if you have a history to compare the current view against. Therefore, only consistent and meticulous reporting built-up over time will enable you to incorporate it into a broader picture of what goes into your public relations and content marketing and the outcomes thereof.

5 Alternative PR Metrics Worth Monitoring

What’s trending online this morning? The Super Bowl, of course! 

The winners, losers, players, and the halftime show have all been popular topics of conversation online. But, how much talk are we talkin’? And what exactly was mentioned?

We wanted to know the answer, so we set out to see how often the big game was mentioned on social media and what exactly people were talking about. To do this, we used our media intelligence platform to dive into the social media and news data behind the game.

We even did some data digging to understand each team’s online audience and following. 

To kick off the stats, we’ll start with the total social media mentions across the board. The Kansas City Chiefs received 2.18 million mentions while the San Francisco 49ers took the lead with 3.17 million. The top-performing platform? Twitter. Both teams scored up to 1.55 million mentions from the platform alone. 

Take a look at some interesting highlights:

The dynamic duo JLo and Shakira each rocked the halftime show with 1.46 million mentions and 1.38 million respectively 

The halftime show sentiment was 48% positive, 22% negative and 30% neutral…how did you feel about it?

Kim Kardashian West, Shakira, and People Magazine won for the most popular social influencers posts

Want to know who watched the Super Bowl? Using our Audience Insight feature, we were able to build a report profiling each team’s Twitter followers. Here’s what the data shows. 

If you want to see what your audience looks like, get in touch for more details.

Super Bowl 2020 Data: Explore the numbers behind the big game

Everyone wants advice and insight on overcoming life's biggest challenges. Successful business leaders are often at the top of the list of trustworthy thinkers who are successfully navigating tough problems and coming out on top. Today's most influential futurists, analysts, and forecasters are shaping minds on social media by drawing from their own experience. Follow them and learn from them. Once you've gotten the hang of how they do it, the next step is to harness your own brand's internal knowledge base and define your business as a mover and shaker with a finger on the pulse. To get started, read our ebook on social media for executives, our essential guide to working with influencers, and finally the ins and outs of trendspotting.

These days tweets and Instagram posts are a dime a dozen. All it takes is a few strokes of the keyboard for aspiring influencers (and self-proclaimed futurists, analysts, and forecasters) to share their latest hot take on a variety of subjects.

It seems that the more content that people share, the more important it becomes to seek out those that cut through the noise. Influencers that rely on a combination of facts, data, and intuition to elevate their content are a breath of fresh air in what can otherwise be a crowded online community.

That’s exactly why we scoured social media to find the very best industry analysts, economists, forecasters, and brands that are shaping the way we think.

These influential futurists are worth a follow.

The Most Influential Futurists, Analysts, and Forecasters on Social Media

One individual futurist that has become somewhat of a legend on Twitter is Naval.

Naval Ravikant is the CEO and co-founder of AngelList and has invested in more than 100 companies, including Uber, Twitter, Yammer, and many others. He’s a deep thinker and offers counterintuitive perspectives to many of life’s biggest challenges such as happiness, wealth, and careers. 

Naval on Twitter: "How to Get Rich (without getting lucky):"

What makes Naval’s content so unique is that he’s able to connect seemingly unrelated topics and turn them into actionable advice. That advice is straightforward and simple, yet incredibly insightful.

Reading Naval’s content is a great reminder to all of us that it doesn’t take complicated messaging or marketing hacks to inspire action.

A former member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, Betsy Stevenson is a must-follow futurist focused on shedding light on complex economic issues. From affordable housing to the health of the U.S. workforce, Stevenson uses social media as a platform to voice change. 

Betsey Stevenson on Twitter: "There are two ways to look at employment growth--from the employer survey and the household survey. The employer survey gives a more accurate read, but it's still worthwhile to look at the household survey and it shows that employment has grown by only 64K since January. [1/3]"

What makes Stevenson’s message so powerful is that she strategically blends the objective (facts, data, and research) with the subjects (strong narrative). 

Data-backed storytelling plays a pivotal role in triggering an emotional and intellectual pulse that captures your audience’s attention and keeps them coming back for more.

James Clear is an American author, entrepreneur, and photographer who writes about habits and human potential. As his website states, the central question he’s trying to answer through his work is, “How can we live better?“

What makes James such an intriguing futurist is his focus on the individual person and their potential impact. He believes that the best way to change the world is in concentric circles—starting with yourself and work your way out from there.

James Clear on Twitter: "If you want to be in the top 1% of a particular domain, then you can’t take your cues from and follow the social norms of 99% of people.

This is harder than it sounds. We are wired to imitate. The further you want to climb, the more carefully you need to construct your tribe."

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