Social citation
A social citation is when an AI answer cites a community or social site, such as a forum thread, a Reddit post or a YouTube video.
A social citation is when an AI answer cites a community or social site: a forum thread, a Reddit post, a YouTube video, a LinkedIn post. These are the places where customers talk to each other, so the platforms often read them when someone asks what people really think.
For a marketer, they're a different kind of source from a review site or a news article. You can't write them, and you can't pitch them. What you can do is take part in them honestly, and make something people want to talk about.
Where they come from
Social citations tend to come up for questions about experience and opinion. "Is this grinder worth it?" "What do people say about Fernhill's subscription?" "Which roaster do baristas use at home?" A thread where ten people answer that question is exactly what the platform is looking for.
Old threads can carry on being read for years. A complaint from before you fixed something can keep turning up in answers long after it stopped being true.
An example
For example, Kestrel Roasters looks at 60 answers to its grinder prompts and finds that 14 of them used the same forum thread, where someone asked for a grinder under £200. The thread names Harrow & Pine twice and Kestrel never.
Kestrel's head roaster replies in the thread, says who he is and where he works, and gives his honest pick with the reasons. That's a useful reply to the person who asked, and it puts Kestrel on a page the platforms already read.
What doesn't work is posting as a happy customer when you're the brand. Communities spot it, and it can do more harm than the thread did.
In AnswerOrbit
In Sources, every page that isn't yours or a competitor's is grouped by type, and community and social is one of the groups. Your recommendations can include answering a forum thread, and we never recommend posts that hide who you are. Add your own social accounts under Channels in Settings.