Use the words ‘buzz’ and ‘sumo’ in one sentence and you’ll probably get yourself quite an interesting situation (an image of a super-fast sumo wrestler just pops into my mind). Join them in one new word, however, and you’ve got yourself the most powerful content analyzer you can use to improve your overall marketing strategy.
So, what’s with all the buzz around BuzzSumo?
1. What is BuzzSumo?
Let’s start off by mentioning just some of the big names that have implemented BuzzSumo into their marketing strategy. Yahoo, Hubspot, IBM, Buzzfeed, NatGeo, TED, Rolling Stone, Vimeo, etc. The list goes on and on. What do all of them have in common? Success. Great content too.
BuzzSumo is a content analysis tool that helps you learn what content works best for different topics and competitors. It can be used to get content insights, find and understand influencers, do competitor analysis, and, eventually, improve your content and your overall marketing strategy.
In order to better understand how to use BuzzSumo to improve your content, it’s important to know what kind of content appeals to people. Two main questions arise here. Why do people share and what makes content go viral?
Why do people share?
At BuzzSumo, they’ve analyzed 100 million posts with a single goal. To solve one of two greatest mysteries of the modern age – what makes people share content? In case you’re wondering, the other, unrelated mystery is the secret behind the popularity of Facebook quizzes, but we already solved that one. Back to the topic, the findings show that there are 3 main things the most viral pieces of content have in common:
- It appeals to people’s emotions and/or boosts their ego. Content that causes people to feel awe or amusement, or makes them seem or feel smart for sharing it, is more likely to be shared. As it seems, a lot of people actually share content for selfish purposes – it’s expected to make them look good.
- It contains lists and/or infographics. Images as well, of course. Apparently, people just love content that’s visually appealing.
- It’s trustworthy. Great content should be well-researched and must come from trusted and reliable sources, and be backed-up by concrete facts and examples.
In addition, there have been numerous studies on the impact of content length on the number of shares. Contrary to the expectations grounded in the hectic nature of modern life, one of those studies has shown that the longer the content, the more shares it gets. Worry not, we’re going to teach you a bit later how to use BuzzSumo to determine the ideal content type and length for your needs.
Content is a vital part of any meaningful marketing strategy. In this marketing kingdom of content, a crafty marketer always has to find new ways of pushing their content through the clutter and placing it right before the eyes of their audience. Our not-so-crafty marketers should thank the heavens for BuzzSumo because it’s been sent here to make their life much easier. Let’s examine exactly how.
2. How to Use BuzzSumo to Improve Your Overall Marketing Strategy?
Tip #1 – Get Content Ideas
One of the primary BuzzSumo benefits is gaining content insights and learning what resonates with your audience. It may also be a perfect solution in case of a writer’s (or marketer’s) block, as it may provide you with some great content ideas. There are two main approaches to content research that can get you new content ideas – keyword-based and domain-based research.
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With keyword-based research, the focus should be on content-driven keywords. Just type in the keywords of interest and BuzzSumo will instantly return results that show content created around those keywords. If the results are not relevant enough, you can narrow the search down a bit or filter and order the results according to your specifications.
Domain-based research functions in a similar way, just instead of running keywords through BuzzSumo, you run domains. What’s the difference in terms of benefits? It enables you to gain useful insight into what your competitors are doing and learn what’s working for a particular domain. But we’ll go into competitor analysis in more detail soon.
Discover What’s Trending
In our industry, it’s often vital to cover topics while they’re still trending. BuzzSumo enables you to see what content gets shared the most at the moment. Just perform your search while filtering by recent results and you’ve got yourself some actual trends. The more engagement it gets, the more trending a piece of content is.
Keyword Alerts
BuzzSumo content alerts feature enables you to get updated whenever new content is posted. Be alerted when your keyword gets mentioned in an article, or when your competitor or a specific author publishes a new share-worthy post. You can also refine the way you receive alerts and decide whether you want them as soon as content is published or in form of a daily digest. This way, you can be among the first to catch up with any upcoming trends or recognize new trends in the making.
Tip #2 – Do Competitor Analysis to Improve Your Link Building Strategy
When it comes to SEO, in terms of importance, links have to be right next to content. Of course, BuzzSumo is not going to magically improve your link building strategy, but it can provide you with some valuable insight. For example, it can show you where your competitors are getting their links from. If you click “Backlinks” on your dashboard, you can perform a simple search to discover who’s linking to your competitors’ websites. Not only that, but you can also check all the backlinks coming from a particular site.
Find a website that’s linking to your competitor like crazy and voilà – you’ve got yourself a potential backlinking opportunity! There might be a good chance they would like to link to your website as well.
Not only does BuzzSumo enable you to perform competitor analysis, but you can do competitor comparisons as well. Just in case you can’t decide which of the competitors would be a better ‘role model’.
Tip #3 – Find the Right Influencers to Target
In the simplest of terms, outreach is what you do to reach out to more people. Here, we’re going to deal with outreach marketing in terms of engaging with the leading influencers in the industry in order to promote your content or website.
Influencer marketing has never been easier thanks to BuzzSumo. Whether you’re looking for a guest post or brand endorsement, you need to know who’s the right person to target. This is where BuzzSumo jumps in. From the dashboard, just type in the keywords you’d like to find influencers for and you’ll get a list of relevant content that has the most shares.
A slightly innovative approach could be to write content with a specific influencer in mind. How does it work? First, you find an influencer you’d like to reach out to. Then you write a top-notch, relevant piece of content you think would appeal to them based on the stuff already on their website. All that remains is to let them know about the content you have to offer and hope they’ll promote it in some way (publish it on their blog or share on social media). There’s always the risk that you may be writing in vain, but with high-quality content and the right approach, you may just hit the jackpot.
Tip #4 – Choose the Most Adequate Content Type and Length
When it comes to content type and length, a perfect alternative to speculation and experimentation would be using BuzzSumo to obtain useful empirical data. If you check out the “Content Analysis” section of your dashboard, you’ll find the mentioned data under “Average Shares By Content Type”. It should look something like this:
In addition to content type, another important factor to consider is the content length. There have been numerous studies on the perfect content length and many experts have come to an agreement that an ideal content length is somewhere in the zone of 1,500 words. But still, it largely depends on your industry and target audience. So, the best you can do might be to use BuzzSumo to check what content length the competitors in your niche prefer.
Tip #5 – Decide Which Social Network to Use
Different social networks produce different number of shares for different types of content. That’s a fact. Another fact is that you can use BuzzSumo to find out exactly which social networks produce most shares when it comes to your industry. Should you put all your money on Facebook? Or stick with Twitter more? BuzzSumo can tell you which social network to focus most of your attention on.
3. BuzzSumo Free vs. Pro (pricing and alternatives)
Although the Free version should be more than enough for the basic users looking to get their feet wet, the Pro version could be the right thing for those looking to dive in really deep into the world of content analysis. Here are some of the features offered exclusively in BuzzSumo Pro:
- UNLIMITED content analysis. While in the Free version you can only see a certain number of results, which cannot be customized by language/country, Pro offers unlimited options.
- Content alerts. This feature enables you to receive alerts on brand or keyword mentions, or even on new backlinks. It’s just like a real-time picture of the traction you get in your campaigns.
- Domain comparisons. If you want to check how well you compare to your competitors, you’ll have to switch to Pro.
If you’re still not sure which one to use, BuzzSumo offers a free 7-day trial with all of their Pro plans.
In case you’re not impressed with what BuzzSumo has to offer, we’ll briefly mention some alternatives for you to consider and further explore:
- Feedly, as its name may suggest, helps extract text from feeds, online magazines and blogs, based on the keywords you specify.
- Oktopost is intended primarily for marketers who deal with B2B. We’ve already shared some helpful tips on how to make the best out of content marketing in order to boost B2B sales.
- Sprout Social is a social media-focused content analysis tool with strong customer-oriented integrations.
- Ahrefs. Perfect for keyword research and improving SEO. You may also want to learn how we at Leadquizzes used Ahrefs to grow our SEO by 959% in just one year.
Does it live up to the buzz?
Definitely. In our humble view, BuzzSumo is nothing short of a gold mine for every aspiring marketer. If used properly, it will give you invaluable insights into how to improve your overall marketing strategy in terms of getting new content ideas and doing influencer research or competitor analysis. So, start digging for those new content ideas with BuzzSumo right away.
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