Content marketing is emerging as a highly valuable practice for businesses and brands. Producing consistently exciting, educational material is a round-the-clock job. It's expected that even the greatest content marketers are sometimes at a loss for their next topic.
That's where BuzzSumo comes in. A social media curation tool that provides insight into the most popular content and influencers online, BuzzSumo is the perfect sidekick to help content marketers stay on top of their game.
What Is BuzzSumo?
To begin, let's review the basic functions of this completely free (and totally cool) social research engine:
- Search for content that has been widely shared within Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+.
- Filter results by content type (articles, infographics, interviews, videos etc.) and date.
- Identify influential content creators and sharers.
- Gather statistics on industry influencers.
- Export all intelligence to Excel spreadsheets.
Sounds pretty nifty right? This is only the beginning of what BuzzSumo can do to help you generate and share engaging content across all social networks while simultaneously learning from leaders in your field.
How to Use BuzzSumo for Content Marketing
Today's digital world is one of automation. We love automation because it makes our jobs and our lives easier. So while you can't automatically generate wildly popular content, BuzzSumo can make it easier. If you're a content marketer, then you know the pain of struggling for a great topic when ideas just won't come, or wondering why your latest piece didn't receive the engagement you expected. BuzzSumo has the answer to both of these dilemmas. Simply identify the general keyword you'd like to talk about, plug it in to BuzzSumo and let the engine churn out results.
With BuzzSumo, you can:
- Re-imagine old ideas: Identify patterns of sharing over the last six months and reignite ideas that were popular a few months ago in a new light relevant to your business.
- Connect with influencers: Explore the list of top sharers and consider contacting them for a quote, a guest post or to simply share your latest piece. The tool also reveals which sources each influencer commonly shares links from and how often.
- Improve your content sharing strategy: Easily identify which types of content and keywords are most popular on each social network and rework you sharing strategy around these insights. This may even mean creating drastically different content for different social outlets.
- Share content your audience will love: Content marketing isn't just about creating infectious content. Sharing the great work of others in the industry is equally important and BuzzSumo brings the best content right to you.
- Monitor your content: Not only does the tool help with creating your own content, but you can easily monitor its success after publishing. Engage with top sharers of your content and ask them what it was they liked most about the piece.
- Monitor your competitors' content: Perform a domain name search in BuzzSumo and identify which of your competitor's content is being shared most and by who. With this information, you can follow their top sharers (or add them to a private Twitter list) and engage with them.
Conclusion
It's really a no-brainer. There's no reason for BuzzSumo not to be part of your content strategy. While you clearly shouldn't rely on it for ALL of your content ideas, it can definitely help narrow your focus and provide valuable insights and analysis of your target audience and their sharing behaviors on social media. As mentioned earlier, the resource is offered entirely free of cost, despite no longer being in beta. In fact, BuzzSumo Pro is in the works to offer new features and even deeper analysis.
You don't have to take our word for it. Go check out BuzzSumo for yourself and let us know what you think!