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Jess joined Meltwater in August 2020 and is the Junior Marketing Manager for UKI operations. She has an Honours Degree in Marketing from the University of Northampton and has 7+ years’ industry experience specialising in communications and digital marketing, Jess has worked within a variety of industries including financial services, defence and technology. Beyond her work as a marketer, she is studying towards her Chartership from the Chartered Institute of Marketing(CIM).

Junior Marketing Manager UKI

See all blogs written by Jess Smith, Junior Marketing Manager UKI at Meltwater ► Organic ★ Digital Marketing ★ SEM ★ Social Media Marketing ★

Author: Jess Smith

Meltwater works with over 30,000 agency and brand clients all over the world. Operating in many diverse markets gives us unique insight into the challenges marketing agencies like yours face when it comes to staying agile and demonstrating results. Leading agencies are using Meltwater to address these challenges with ease. Together, we can explore how these agencies are transforming their efforts and proving their value thanks to the power of technology and insight.

Our aim is to provide a single source of truth for your agency as well as your clients.

Influencer Marketing and Management for Your Clients

Tip: Learn how to hire a marketing agency.

We understand that branding is about so much more than just the brand. It is a complex discipline which comprises your social footprint, pre-planned designs, concepts and products. It can be easy to create a brand, but building that brand  takes time and commitment. In the same breathe, agencies and in-house teams alike are required to quantify results and every client has their own preferences or objectives in terms of KPIs. Without the right tools, it can be resource intensive, but in the end, the dedication to your brand is paramount, because a company can only build and maintain an emotional relationship with the customer through branding.

Agency clients use Meltwater to measure and monitor brand performance, by creating custom searches - including media exposure, sentiment, and potential reach. With Meltwater, making sense of the data is simplified with the provision of clear and centralised dashboards and presentation-ready reports. This enables our clients to understand their brand's impact in real-time, while making use of interactive visual dashboards and analysing the metrics that matter.

Did you know? Now there are also TikTok scheduling tools available!

Another crucial aspect of brand management involves benchmarking against competitors or peers in the market place. So, how do you discover which competitors are gaining traction across news and social media channels? Let's take a look...

It isn't always easy to validate the cost of a campaign, however, agencies can demonstrate performance by getting down to the cold, hard facts. Collect accurate data in real-time, tally your wins for clients and create more in-depth strategies. 

How do you validate the cost of a campaign? Return on Investment (ROI). Those three letters can sometimes feel illusive when you're working on multiple projects with different clients. That being said, Meltwater can help you centralise your information in one place enabling you to monitor and track a campaign from beginning to end and analyse the results within the platform collaboratively.

Analyse to optimise - our clients use campaign tracking as a crucial tool when it comes to adapting their strategic thinking; digging deep to draw meaningful insights that formulate new ideas and facilitate more meaningful proposals.

Campaign tracking also helps you justify spend or increased budget requests and prove that your work is (quite literally) paying off. 

Attribute the value of your earned media to revenue

Determine whether you're meeting your core goals and KPIs

Monitor and analyse traffic, leads and conversions

Use Custom Scoring to determine the quality of mentions

Plug into a CRM to customise and track your user's experience.

Compare channel performance to determine where your energy and resources are most effective.

As influencer marketing becomes more popular, not just for B2C but B2B, NGOs and Direct To Consumer (DTC) organisations, it’s important to have a robust system in place that allows you to find, vet, contact and manage influencers. 

Social media influencers can help spread your message to a wider audience online, adding a level of authenticity that can only come from the endorsement of a trusted third party. The best influencers spend years building up organic audiences which trust their recommendations, and they can give brands a significant performance boost through well-planned partnerships.

But influencer marketing is hard to get right, and there are a lot of pitfalls for marketers who aren't adequately prepared to navigate this evolving landscape. With an explosion of social media influencers on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and other social platforms, it can be difficult to find the right creators to work with, and to manage those relationships.

Meltwater helps clients build an influencer marketing hub for your brand that streamlines the entire process and helps you increase ROI from influencer partnerships. Plus, it makes managing your campaigns more productive (as an agency and for clients).

Find the best influencers that align with your objectives and brand

Use our powerful analytics to build an influencer marketing strategy

Streamline influencer campaign management with a purpose-built CRM platform 

Automate reporting and analytics to track ROI.

Whatever industry you’re in, our influencer tool can help you pinpoint the most influential voices in the space and verify that their audiences are genuine, so you never have to worry about wasting time with fakers.

The filters help you focus your search on topics, regions, and channels while audience demographics can help you target the right audiences through influence.

And it’s not just for superstar-influencers with a global footprint. We know that specific brands gain more value from partnering with highly targeted micro-influencers, covering niches that are specifically relevant to targeted interests. Whoever you want to work with, we’ll help you find them.

The wrong relationship can be highly damaging to your brand, so it’s essential to thoroughly vet potential influencer partners to be sure they’re right for what you're trying to achieve. Our algorithms give you a complete picture of the influencers you're thinking of partnering with.

With this level of in-depth understanding, you'll be able to recruit a comprehensive network of brand advocates who can share your message with their networks. This will enable you to reach an even wider audience to increase brand recognition and, engagement on your social channels and, ultimately, make a positive impact on the bottom line.

Need help with your influencer marketing strategy? Get in touch with us using the form below.

Every day, billions of conversations take place on social media: in tweets, posts, comments, blogs, reviews, podcasts, and more. 

Whatever business you’re in, a portion of those discussions are directly related to your offering. The internet is full of people talking about your brand, competitors, the industry you work in, the problems you could help them with, and many other topics that could provide valuable insights for your organisation. And, if they are speaking about your brand specifically, they're still taking part in conversations that have do do with your industry, representing potential.

But how do you find and make sense of those insights, when they’re buried under a rapidly growing mountain of social media data? 

This is what social listening tools are for. They search social media for you and sift through those huge volumes of social data to extract what's relevant to you by filtering specific words and phrases, such as your brand name or related topics.

This produces a smaller, more manageable dataset, which can then be analysed to provide useful insights.

And this relevance goes beyond social media marketing. Any company can benefit from a social listening strategy, as it will help you to better understand your potential customers and create data-driven marketing campaigns that align with your business goals.

If you’re not paying attention, you’re missing opportunities.

Whenever somebody mentions your brand on social media, or talks about a topic that’s important to your business, you should know about it. Meltwater offers the industry’s most comprehensive social listening platform, so you can be sure you never miss a relevant mention. Our tool scours data feeds from:

Meltwater gives you unlimited keyword search capability with no cap on result volumes. What does this mean? You can search for as many different keywords, brand names or hashtags as you like and you won’t be billed extra - no matter how many results those searches produce.

This is great news for agencies who want to grow their client-base without growing their costs, and for in-house teams that need to carry out a number of social media research tasks, and try out different ideas, while keeping the budget under control. Our social media monitoring platform gives digital marketing professionals everything they need to effectively protect and grow their brands.

But it’s not just about what’s happening right now. To get a truly meaningful understanding of any topic, you can use Meltwater to search a 15-month archive of social data, including the full Twitter Firehose. This allows you to analyse historical patterns and perform year-on-year comparisons of key metrics.

With such a significant source of social data at your fingertips, there’s absolutely nothing you can’t learn. Build your query with our powerful Boolean search tool, and then dive into the data using the industry’s best analytics tools, to discover the hidden insights that will power your next marketing campaign, or inspire your next agency proposal.

In the digital world, data can help you generate new leads, gain brand credibility and reach new audiences - giving you the competitive edge. Our clients use Meltwater to stay ahead of the competition with insider insight into the strategies and performance of brands on their watch-list. 

The best way to generate new leads is to understand if your competitors are outsmarting you and where your brand is shining. Make sure you identify threats before they become a crisis and make the most of new opportunities.

By monitoring conversations about competitor brands, you can understand what their audience’s key pain points are and identify opportunities where you could step in and help. It also gives you a wholistic view of the marketplace and where you stand in terms of share of voice.

If you don’t have a standardised system for reporting on competitive research, it can be difficult to evaluate and report your findings. Meltwater’s benchmark reports allow you to create customisable dashboards to start understanding the competitive landscape in detail. Find overlapping content and audiences, view relevant conversations and understand how much clout you truly have. In the platform you can:

Create dashboards and benchmark against competitors

Plan strategic experiments, based on current data

Translate results into reports - in seconds

Find out which brands in your industry are your biggest competition.

Getting into the hearts and minds of your consumers is no easy feat - unless you have the right tools for the job. With Meltwater, you can identify user wants, needs and behaviours, and create exciting strategies and reports to inspire new campaigns for your clients. 

When looking at consumers, as marketers, we tend to gravitate towards creating personas often with a lot of guess-work on their age, interests and demographics. However, by monitoring social conversations you get rich insights into the different segments and communities across social media.

A key aspect of audience ‘feeling’ is sentiment. Sentiment is a metric, which was designed to provide helpful insights into how audiences feel about and perceive a brand (brand perception), particularly on social media platforms and in editorial news media. This marketing metric is used to help brands manage and protect their reputation, while staying abreast of their performance in the online environment:

Monitor unlimited keywords across all channels

Use Audience Analytics to make informed decisions about new campaigns

Research and listen to more than 200 billion social conversations.

The sheer volume of data available to agencies online can be a hinderance when it comes to truly understanding your market. With Meltwater, we help you distil that data into relevant and manageable bites that add real value to your research.

Draw refined insights from large data samples

Merge qualitative and quantitative insights for a holistic overview

Get unlimited ad-hoc searches to help you continuously refine your findings. 

We recently published an article dedicated to using Meltwater as a research tool for agencies, check it out.

Thank you for getting in touch, our team will contact you shortly.

Meltwater is an all-in-one-solution for marketing agencies, explore how leading marketing agencies will use Meltwater in 2023.

How Will Leading Agencies Use Meltwater In 2024?

We’d all love a clear-cut answer to the modern-age social media question: When is the best time to post your Instagram content? 

The answer might not be as simple as an X on a calendar - but it doesn’t need to be impossible to find out, either. The absolute perfect time to post depends on the audience you have, the audience you want to reach, and their online habits.

Getting that information requires some deep-diving into the numbers and analytics of a UK-based audience. But even before that happens, having a general idea of the best times is helpful to know how to optimise your Instagram strategy.

Looking at Habits of Your UK Audience on Instagram

Identifying the Best Time to Post to Your Specific UK Audience

If you’re running an account in the UK, and you’re posting to UK-based followers, these best practice statistics will help you get optimal reach and results from your content:

The best time to post on Instagram in the UK

As a general rule, the best times to post are in the morning, either before or during lunchtime. However, the ideal time to post for each day is slightly different:

Posting late at night (any time after 23h00) generates the least traffic and engagement. This is especially true over the weekend. People are either sleeping or socialising, and are not engaging attentively online.

Instagram users in the UK are most active on Tuesday and Thursday.


Instagram engagement is at its lowest over the weekend - Sunday is statistically the worst day for posting. 

2. The Best Time to Post on a Monday in the UK

In the UK, most users start the week by waking up, browsing their social platforms, and then getting ready to begin their work week. With this in mind, Instagram content performs best early in the morning, around 06h00, and then again between 11h00 and 12h00. Online engagement peaks around the lunch break. Posts scheduled for the night, even as late as 21h00, will perform better than other weekdays as users tend to work later on a Monday.

3. The Best Time to Post on a Tuesday in the UK

Tuesday engagement is highest around 09h00 and throughout the morning. After 18h00 is also a good time for content, as users are winding down after their work day.

 4. The Best Time to Post on a Wednesday in the UK

Instagram content performs similarly on Wednesdays as it does on Mondays, as people work through their tasks for the week. Posting around 11h00 and noon gets the most traffic.

5. The Best Time to Post on a Thursday in the UK

Statistically, the best time for Thursday content is late morning, closely followed by early morning. Posts published after 19h00 also perform well.

6. The Best Time to Post on a Friday in the UK

Friday is unusual, with engagement highest in the afternoon. The prime time to post is at 16h00 as people are either getting home or are commuting back from work. Early and late evening posts don’t tend to perform well.

7. The Best Time to Post on a Saturday in the UK

Many users sleep in on a Saturday or wake up for a specific activity, so early morning posts don’t generate significant engagement. Around 11h00 on a Saturday is the perfect time to schedule posts.

8. The Best Time to Post on a Sunday in the UK

Sunday evening used to be the best time overall to post on social media, not only in the UK but across the world. However, online behaviour has changed, and posts scheduled for the late morning generate afternoon traffic and engagement as people gear up for the week ahead.

9. Looking at Habits of Your UK Audience on Instagram

While it’s essential to know the overall best times to post for your scheduling and strategy, it’s equally important to pay attention to your audience and their online behaviours. 

For example, if you’re looking to target an audience that typically commutes to work, look to capitalise on peak bus and train times so that they see your content while travelling to and from work. If your audience is more likely to get around by car, it’s better to avoid posting while they are likely driving and won’t be engaging online.

But remember: for every rule, you’ll find the exception. While Sundays are generally the lowest performing day for engagement, if the content is relevant (such as an account run by a church or an event) then the audience will be looking out to engage on Sundays. Don’t be afraid to break from the norm where it will work better for you!

The more knowledge you have of your UK Instagram audience, the easier it will be to identify the very best time for you to post.

10. Identifying the Best Time to Post to Your Specific UK Audience

The best way to increase reach and fully maximise Instagram potential: use social media management tools to help analyse and identify the browsing habits of your target audience.

Meltwater’s social media management suite will help you increase engagement and get the most out of your content to enhance your digital content strategy.

Get in touch with us for a free platform demo.


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How Meltwater Helps You Find the Best Time To Post on Instagram in the UK

When Is The Best Time To Post on Instagram in The UK?

If you don't have a PR agency, learning the basics of public and media relations helps you beat the competition when it comes to getting attention for your brand. Knowing the best places to distribute your release is essential.

In this blog, we will explore the top press release distribution services in the UK and how you can best maximise your time and resources.

List of the top UK press release distribution companies

What is the best way to distribute press releases in the UK?

To kick off, here’s a short list of the top UK press release distribution companies every marketing team should know:

1. Meltwater UK Press Release Distribution

Tip: Use our free press release template to write your next press release and learn how to pitch successfully to journalists.

Struggling to create awareness around important announcements in the UK? You're not alone. Creating engaging content is one thing, but getting it in front of audiences that care is another.

After a PR professional writes a press release, they need a way to distribute it. This is where a press release distribution service becomes handy. We understand different needs require different solutions, that's why we offer a number of ways to help get your press release seen.

Meltwater partners with journalists to develop online profiles. This assures they are only getting quality pitches while helping brands ensure their press releases are going to journalists who have been fully vetted. It’s a win-win situation and a great way to build your distribution network.

Meltwater UK's press release distribution service also includes:

Integration in to over 100 services for local, national and global audiences and a strong presence in Europe. 

 Meltwater Wire Distribution via GlobeNewswire

Hyper-Targeted PR Outreach with Keyword Search

Comprehensive reporting with easy-to-share dashboards with key insights

Learn more about the Meltwater Media Database and Meltwater Press Release Distribution Service for the UK!

Launched in 2010, Pressat newswire reaches targeted journalists, editors, influencers & news-desks and has an in-house editorial team to send releases to the most relevant medias to ensure it's effective and seen where it matters most. They also offer UK media contacts.

Pressat also serves more than 33,000 opt-in subscribers with customised news alerts, ranging from journalists and editors right through to analysts and bloggers.

PR Fire is one of the UK’s leading press release distribution platforms with guaranteed global reach.

They help businesses grow get published, syndicated and featured on high-authority news media.

PR Fire also offers a Distribute only or Write & Distribute option if you need support crafting your press release.

PR Newswire has been a trusted provider in this space for some time.

They deliver to editorial systems and newsrooms of major media organisations and connect brand messages with influential journalists — from their active community of more than 36,000 members — who have specifically requested to see news in specific industries.

Tip: Get to know other Cision alternatives on the market.

Journalists are inundated with hundreds of press releases every day. To cut through, you’ll need a good pitch and help finding the right person to tell your story.

To find the best press release distribution service in the UK, look for those companies that have a local presence and have made a commitment to both journalists and brands to produce great results.

What press release distribution services provide the best value?

There are a few things to consider before you choose a press release service.

Not all press release services are the same.
Some are nothing more than online portals that rely on you to make decisions about what UK news outlets are mostly likely to distribute your news.

Make sure the service you use maintains the most current UK media contacts list.
Journalists change jobs frequently and outdated contact details mean your release is dead in the water. Companies like Meltwater partner with journalists to develop online profiles. This assures they are only getting quality pitches while helping brands ensure their press releases are going to journalists who have been fully vetted. It’s a win-win situation and a great way to build your distribution network.

A highly targeted list of UK journalists is going to be more valuable than a scattergun approach.
When it comes to achieving your PR goals, the narrower you can make your list, the better.

Choose a company with offices in the UK.
They will have local knowledge of the UK media landscape and will be able to offer support to ensure your news lands where you want it.

If your marketing team doesn’t have direct connections with journalists in the UK, don’t worry. We have some tips for you:

Social media has made it much easier for marketing, corporate affairs and advertising teams to develop their own distribution networks.

How do you do that? Nearly every reporter in print, television, and radio is active on social media, especially Twitter and LinkedIn. They are always on the lookout for good stories and are especially receptive to people who know how to pitch a good story.

You can also find UK media outlets on social media.

Start making contacts by following press accounts on social platforms like Twitter. It's often easier to make digital connections with key players by finding them online. Make sure the account has a blue tick showing it’s been authenticated by Twitter and it's not being run as a digital spoof.

List of the top verified UK newspaper Twitter accounts

Another way to decide where you want to pitch a story is to make your own media lists. The UK's media landscape is constantly evolving, but the global pandemic put everything on fast forward.

It’s important to know how to stay on top of the UK's media trends.

Make sure your media list contains journalists who cover your beat. If you’re working in the healthcare industry, find those who cover health. If you work in manufacturing, find the people writing industrial stories.

The more relevant your pitch is to the person receiving it, the greater the likelihood you’ll be successful in getting your story featured (Try personalised PR). 

Keep in mind the biggest names in UK journalism get so many pitches they can’t possibly read them all. Finding a young reporter and developing a relationship with them can return PR dividends to your marketing team for years to come.

Get in touch with Meltwater by filling out the form below to learn more about how the Meltwater press release distribution product can get your important stories in front of UK journalists who want to hear them and will share them with their audiences.

Fed up with creating a UK press release and no one seeing it? We've listed the top UK press release distribution services to help you.

The Best Press Release Distribution Services in the UK

Note: This blog is based on the Digital 2023 Global Overview Report – produced in partnership with Meltwater and We Are Social. See Simon Kemp's article about The Changing World of Digital in 2023. Download the Global Digital Report 2024 and the Global Digital Report 2023 for free.

If there's one thing you can count on in social media its that it will be constantly evolving and changing. We recently released our most comprehensive digital trends report to date in partnership with We Are Social and Simon Kemp (world renowned data analyst). With this report, you can find out what your digital strategies are missing and help you make data-led decisions for your campaigns and marketing initiatives going forward.

How many people use social media in the UK?

Main reasons for using social media in the UK

Most used social media platforms in the UK

Time spent using social media apps in the UK

Summary: Outstanding insights into the UK digital landscape

In this blog, we feature the key social media insights for the United Kingdom and a deep dive into the social media usage of each platform. Although this blog covers 2023 social media insights for the United Kingdom, you can also compare statistics from 2015 for the UK here. All UK social media usage statistics detailed in this blog are from the start of 2023.

Tip: Take a look at other general social media statistics if you are interested in this topic

To understand the statistics for each social media platform, we need to build a foundation of data around the overall usage of the internet compared to the general population:

UK total population was 67.62 million, an increase of 0.3% compared to 2022

UK gender divide: 50.6 percent is female, while 49.4 percent of the population is male*

Geographical factors: 84.5 percent of the United Kingdom’s population lived in urban centres, while 15.5 percent lived in rural areas

The median age of the United Kingdom’s population is 40.0

Total internet users in the UK was 66.11 million, analysis indicates that internet users in the UK increased by 224 thousand (+0.3 percent) between 2022 and 2023.

*Note: gender data are currently only available for “female” and “male”.

While these numbers offer an excellent snapshot of the make up of the UK's population to understand how the adoption of the internet and social media usage is increasing, we need to take a deeper dive into what those statistics actually mean in terms of online behaviours and how it impacts your digital strategies in the UK for 202

There were 57.10 million social media users in the United Kingdom in January 2023.

Compared to previous years, in almost all countries and particularly in the UK, social media use continues to increase.

More broadly, 86.4 percent of the United Kingdom’s total internet user base (regardless of age) used at least one social media platform in January 2023. Now that we know the overall internet and social media usage in the UK, let's break it down per social media platform to truly understand where you should be focusing your social media strategies based on your target audience.

There are many reasons why people use social media in the UK.

At the top of the chart is keeping in touch with friends and family, showing us that social media is still a truly "social" experience for most people but one of the most interesting findings is the 4th line representing 22.2% are using social media in the UK to find inspiration for things to do and buy.

Tip: Take a look at our social commerce blog to find out how to leverage these findings for your marketing strategy.

Whatsapp and Facebook lead the pack in terms of the most used social media platforms in the UK.

Surprisingly, TikTok doesn't fall into the top 5 most used social media platforms despite it being the fastest-growing social media platform.

Tip: Learn How To Use WhatsApp for Business, and find out more about WhatsApp Broadcast.

Although TikTok wasn't in the top 5 most-used social media platforms in the UK, the time spent on the platform is staggering.

The report states that UK users, on average, are spending more than 27 hours per month on the platform. While the other 4 platforms experienced a decrease in time spent on the platform per month.

The statistics do show, however, that video-based platforms have the most time spent on them over the more traditional social platforms.

So let's break it down and look into each platform.

Facebook: Advertising audience overview in the UK

YouTube: Advertising audience overview in the UK

Instagram: Advertising audience overview in the UK

TikTok: Advertising audience overview in the UK

Linkedin: Advertising audience overview in the UK

Snapchat: Advertising audience overview in the UK

Twitter: Advertising audience overview in the UK

Pinterest: Advertising audience overview in the UK

Potential ad reach on the platform decreased by 1.9 percent between 2022 and 2023

54.1 percent of Facebook’s ad audience was female, while 45.9 percent was male

However, even though this showed a slight decrease in the ad reach on the platform, Meta has caveated this by stating “Estimated audience size is not a proxy for monthly or daily active users, or for engagement. Estimates aren’t designed to match population, census estimates or other sources, and may differ depending on factors such as how many accounts across Meta technologies a person has, how many temporary visitors are in a particular geographic location at a given time, and Meta user-reported demographics.”

As a result, changes in ad reach may not necessarily indicate any change in the platform’s overall user base. But despite these caveats, Meta’s ad reach data still offers valuable insights into how Facebook use is evolving.

Tip: Check out our Facebook Management Guide, learn how to create a Facebook Business Page, and check out some helpful Facebook Marketing Tips

Youtube: Advertising audience overview in the UK

YouTube ads reached 86.4 percent of the UK’s total internet user base (regardless of age)

50.2 percent of YouTube’s ad audience was female, while 49.8 percent was male

YouTube’s potential ad reach decreased by 0.9 percent between the start of 2022 and early 2023

Thank you! A member of our team will be in touch shortly

Check out the most important UK social media statistics. Here you find an in-depth analysis of the 2023 UK Digital Report, by report author Simon Kemp.

Jess Smith

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When Is The Best Time To Post on Instagram in The UK?

The Best Press Release Distribution Services in the UK

UK Social Media Statistics [Updated 2023]

UK Media Database Comparison: Get the Best Contacts

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