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BuzzSumo is a popular content marketing tool that can help you analyze popular content, understand your competition and monitor backlinks. In short, it is a content research and monitoring tool that will greatly empower your content marketing strategy.
In this article, we showcase the major features of BuzzSumo and how you can use it to publish better content online.
When you log in to BuzzSumo, the first functionality you are shown is ‘Content Research’. This helps you find popular content related to a particular keyword, topic or website. If you handle more than one website, you can create separate projects for each and demarcate the content strategy for each.
Let’s look at the various features in the Content Research tab.
In this section, you can enter a keyword or domain and search for relevant content that has been shared the most across various social media channels.
You can apply filters such as date, content type, language, country, word count and domains to get the most accurate results.
The results are sorted according to the total number of shares.
You get to see the most popular links, and its performance across various social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn.
The second tab under “Content Research” allows you to find the latest trending content across various topics and domains.
You can choose which feeds you want to follow and even create your own feeds for topics/domains related to your industry. This is a great way to get ideas for new content, capitalize on viral trends, find interesting content to share on social media and identify real-time marketing opportunities.
You probably know the influence of high quality backlinks on your search engine rankings. This feature in BuzzSumo helps you track backlink metrics for a particular domain or URL.
The results give you an indication of how popular the page with the backlink is and how widely it has been shared across social media. You can also filter the results by date and include/exclude certain domains.
This is probably one of the most thorough content analysis tools out there. With this functionality, you’re able to analyze content based on a particular domain or keyword.
Here are some of the different analysis results you can gather:
Content published and the number of shares over time
Average shares by network and content type
Average shares based on content length
The domains that shared the most content for the specified topic
You can also use this tool to compare the content published by two different domains.
This functionality will especially come in handy when you’re trying to find out who your competitors are and what their content strategy is.
If you’re trying to up your Facebook game, you’ll find this feature quite helpful. You can analyze the content shared across Facebook on a particular topic, or find out how your Facebook page is performing.
Note that this functionality is only available for users who’ve subscribed for the Large plan.
The Question Analyzer gives you a list of questions people are asking online based on a particular keyword or in a certain forum.
This would come in handy while creating your content plan. You can pick the top questions that people are searching for in your industry and attempt to answer them through your website content.
The Influencers section helps you find top influencers in your niche. You can also create outreach lists to keep track of the people you’d like to interact with.
This feature allows you to search for authors who’ve written on certain topics or in a particular domain. You can filter your search query based on the influencer type: bloggers, influencers, companies, journalists and regular people.
The results give you a full rundown on their authority, number of Twitter followers and links they’ve shared. This would greatly simplify your outreach activities and help you network with others in your industry.
This section allows you to identify the top authors in a particular domain.
It gives you a complete list of authors along with their Twitter profile, number of articles published, average shares for their articles and total shares.
This section allows you to monitor content related to a particular topic or from a certain website. You first need to create an alert and choose what you want to monitor, such as:
Once you’ve set the alert, BuzzSumo automatically monitors the content and provides metrics related to it. You can opt to receive the alerts via email too.
It gives you the number of mentions and indicates the trend over the past week, month and year.
You can also view the top articles published recently related to the content you’ve chosen to monitor.
Note that the number of alerts you can create depends on the subscription plan you’ve chosen.
The Pro plan costs $79 per month (billed yearly) for 5 alerts and 5000 mentions, but it does not give you access to the Facebook Analyzer and Question Analyzer.
If you have enough capital in your marketing budget, BuzzSumo is a great tool to invest in. The in-depth analyses and ease of use certainly makes it a favorable buy.
Almost all the results that are displayed onscreen in BuzzSumo can be saved and also exported in CSV, Excel or PDF formats. This makes it easy for you to gather reports and monitor your progress.
If you’re using BuzzSumo for the first time, they have handy hints, pop-up tips and a quick walkthrough to help you get acquainted with all the features. If you’re still wondering if you should give it a go, I suggest you sign up for their free 7-day trial that comes with no strings attached.
Honestly, BuzzSumo is one of the best content marketing tools I’ve come across, which is why it’s the first one I’m reviewing this year. If you’ve had prior experience with the tool, please do let me know your thoughts in the comments below.
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