What is Meltwater, and why does your team use it?

If you’re new to Meltwater, chances are someone else on your team chose it. This post covers what it does, why teams rely on it and where everything lives, so you start with the full picture.

🌍 Why Meltwater exists

Stories don’t stay in one place anymore. Here’s how a story usually travels today:

• News breaks it. Coverage gives the story reach and credibility.
• Social spreads it. People react, share and add their own take.
• AI repeats it. Tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity summarize it in their answers, which shapes how people see your brand.

If you track news, social and AI in separate tools, you only ever see part of the story.

🔎 What Meltwater does

Meltwater brings news, social and AI answers into one platform, so you can answer four questions:

• What’s being said? Coverage across online news, print, broadcast, podcasts, blogs, forums, reviews, major social platforms and AI tools.
• Who’s saying it? More than 1 million journalist profiles and 90 million creator profiles.
• Who’s influenced by it? Audience demographics and interests.
• What should we do next? Mira, Meltwater’s built-in AI, explains what changed and why, answers follow-up questions and drafts reports for you.

✨ What makes it different

• No search limits: Unlimited Search means no query caps, so you can follow a story wherever it goes.
• Everything in one place: Searches, dashboards, alerts, reports and newsletters all run on the same data.
• AI built in: Ask Mira a question in plain language instead of building every filter by hand.

📈 What teams get out of it

• Comms and PR: Spot issues early and show your impact. Kaseya cut negative brand mentions by 50% and saved 30% of the time spent across comms, marketing and PR.
• Social and marketing: Find the audiences and content that land. Neuro used Meltwater insights to validate its gaming audience strategy, then saw 406% year-over-year sales growth.
• Consumer insights: Get answers faster. Haleon cut a five-week research process to five days.

🗺️ Find your way around Meltwater

Here’s what each area of the platform does, in the order you’ll see it in the left-hand nav:

• Home: Your starting point. See your recent searches, product overviews and learning resources.
• Mira Studio: A workspace where you go to create. Write a request, build reusable skills or click a ready-made prompt to draft content, summaries and reports. It works from what you give it: your projects, prompts and skills.
• Explore: The building block of the whole platform. Build searches here to track your brand, competitors or industry trends. Every search you save powers everything else: monitoring, dashboards, reports and alerts.
• Monitor: Track media coverage in real time from your saved Explore searches, tags, X author lists or Media Relations media lists.
  • Trends Center: See what’s trending right now across platforms and topics. Spot conversations as they emerge, so you can create timely, relevant content 
• GenAI Lens: 
• Analyze: Build custom dashboards for earned media from your Explore searches or tags, so you can measure the impact of your media efforts.
• Report: Find your daily digest reports. These automated emails keep you up to date with the latest results from your Explore searches.
• Alerts: Send key insights about your brand, competitors or industry trends to any email address, Teams channel or Slack group.
• Content: Manage your saved tags and labels, automated workflows and Newsfeeds.
• Account: Manage your settings, users, integrations and connected social media accounts.
• Mira Companion (top right corner): A helper beside you on any page. Ask a question or make changes right on the page you’re viewing. It knows what you’re looking at, your account and what you’ve used it for before. Not sure how your account is set up? Open Mira Companion and ask for an overview.

Your team’s package decides which of these you can see, so don’t worry if your nav looks a little different.

💡 Not sure how your account is set up? Open Mira Companion and ask it for an overview of your account. It will walk you through what you have access to.

🚀 Where to start

• Join Meltwater Launch: A monthly cohort where you work alongside other new users and our product experts until you’re confident using Meltwater on your own. Share your work, get feedback and earn points for every activity. We recognize the members who help others most.
• Take the Explore Foundations course on Meltwater Academy.
• Join a live workshop: “Get Started with Media Monitoring in Explore” runs every month on the training calendar.
• Ask a question: Comment on this post, we’ll answer it in under 3 hours.

What questions do you have about getting started? Drop them in the comments 👇