Link
http://buzzsumo.com
Specifications
BuzzSumo is a content marketing intelligence platform that provides detailed analytics on the most highly shared content, links, and key influencers for any topic or website. It includes content alerts based on keywords and tools to amplify influencer content.
Cost
Monthly plans range from $99 to $499 and up. A 10% discount is available with an annual contract.
Source
Kari DePhillips, cofounder of The Content Factory, has been using BuzzSumo for about nine months.
How do you use it?
After you log on, you can search for whatever topics you want, set up content alerts, and compare domains.
To search, you just enter whatever topic you’re looking for into the search box. Then BuzzSumo pulls the most shared articles around that topic.
Articles are broken down by channel – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Google+ – and the platform also shows you total shares. If a story has more than 20 shares you can click view shares and it ranks them based on influencer score.
You can organize the output any way you want. You can set it to deliver only journalist stories or blogger posts. You can also sort results by the number of followers someone has or by how likely they are to respond to a tweet on your given topic based on the percentage of tweets they typically respond to on that subject.
I’ve found BuzzSumo’s content alerts much more useful than Google alerts. You can set it up to send you alerts any time a specific brand is mentioned on any channel or when someone links to a page on a brand’s or a competitor’s website. The platform catches these mentions and links almost instantly.
There is a domain comparison feature that highlights how content we have created – or content one of our client’s has created for their website – ranks against content on the same topic on other websites.
For example, if we write about fair trade coffee for one of our clients, we can search for the phrase “fair trade coffee” and run a BuzzSumo report that tells us the length of the most shared content around that topic, what channels is getting the most shares, and on what days that content tends to drive the most engagement.
We’ve never had an issue with BuzzSumo, so I’ve never had to contact them.
How does it serve your business needs?
BuzzSumo gives us a really easy way to find out who is talking about a particular subject and who is sharing related content.
It’s really important that social marketers know who is sharing content related to their industry and how influential they are. Overall, it makes all of our work much more efficient because everything is in one place.
BuzzSumo prevents wasted outreach because it makes it easy to see social media statistics. For example, when we see someone has a 0.2% chance of responding to a tweet on a particular subject, we’re not going to waste time tweeting that person about that topic.
It’s a great resource for finding out what journalists are writing or tweeting about a given subject. All of our clients have Twitter lists of journalists who cover their industry or have covered their company in the past. You can add people to lists from within BuzzSumo’s platform, and you can also tweet to people using the platform.
It’s sometimes difficult to keep abreast of up-and-coming people who are covering topics relevant to our clients. BuzzSumo makes it easy to find out what opportunities we might have with those people.
The content alerts are invaluable. They save us a lot of time, which helps us do more for our clients faster.
Astroglide, the personal lubricant brand, is one of our clients. As a rule, we’re not allowed to interact with any social media posts or articles that use profanity. Jezebel.com recently ran a story based on an Amazon review. The user’s review was extremely crude, but Jezebel’s story went viral because people thought it was funny.
Though we weren’t able to comment, we were able to make our client aware of the situation. We wouldn’t have known about the story as quickly as we did without BuzzSumo. A full day after the Jezebel story broke, Google alerts still hadn’t picked it up whereas BuzzSumo picked it up immediately.
Journalists don’t always let us know when coverage of a client goes live, but BuzzSumo lets us know, and then we can follow up with them. It means that stories do not go unnoticed by clients or journalists.
We offer a social media training package for clients, and BuzzSumo has become a key part of that training.
What are the main benefits?
It’s user friendly, fast, and reports load as fast as your Internet connection will allow.
It outperforms most of the other, more expensive tools we use. For example, we have a PR Newsire package that’s supposed to do much of the same type of thing as BuzzSumo, but the latter pulls more results and faster.
My staff and other agencies we partner with all love the platform. I’ve yet to come across anyone who doesn’t find it useful.
What are the main drawbacks?
Not that I can see. Though I haven’t needed to contact the company for anything, customer support contact information other than the founders’ Twitter handles would be nice to have.
What would you like to see improved/added?
Because Twitter tends to be the public social network on which people are most active, Twitter results are the most robust on BuzzSumo.
It would be great if BuzzSumo could rank top bloggers on any subject based not just on Twitter reach but also based on their websites. BuzzSumo is great at finding people who cover or mention specific topics. I’d love it if it were equally great at finding websites that cover specific topics.
Competitors
Trackmaven: Provides tools to search for and understand real-time trending content in specific channels and market segments.
Bottlenose: Provides trend intelligence in real time, based on analysis of social media data, broadcast media data, and business data.
Trendspottr: A real-time trend intelligence platform that predicts emerging content, influencers and sentiment for any topic or search query.
