BuzzSumo is a great tool for content marketers. Digging up influencers, relevant social content, brand mentions and more can be time-consuming. For most of us, time is a hot commodity, and BuzzSumo makes this kind of content research a lot easier.
Here's the problem: BuzzSumo is not cheap.
A free BuzzSumo account is basically useless, because you'll burn through your trial period and sample queries fast enough to realize that you really need BuzzSumo in your life. Free or less-expensive alternatives, like Alltop or EpicBeat's Epictions, are nice, but nowhere near as helpful.
BuzzSumo Agency accounts are nearly $3,600 per year. That’s serious cash, especially when you’re trying to convince your boss that you deserve a raise, need to upgrade your tech hardware or want to go to an important conference.
Enterprise accounts start at $999 monthly. Unless you’re working for a major corporation or a samurai-level content marketing team, you’re not likely to sniff that rarified air.
BuzzSumo Pro is a bit more manageable at $99 per month. You still have access to a wealth of information, and the price point is a little more palatable to upper management.
A friend of mine once told me that after a vice-president left his company, he left behind over $10,000 in third-party software subscriptions that no one else used, needed or even knew about. Stories like that make your accountant hesitant to hand over the corporate Amex for anything.
Don’t be like that rogue VP. Here are some tips, tricks and hacks to get the most out of your BuzzSumo account. You, however, still have to figure out your own way to ask for a raise.
10 Ways to get the most out of your BuzzSumo Pro account
1. Create Outreach Lists. Everyone talks about influencer marketing -- how important it is, how well it can work, why you need to do it right now. Kind of feel like you’re missing the bus if you don’t have a pocketful of hotshot bloggers cranking out guest posts and retweeting your content, don’t you?
The truth of the matter is that influencer marketing is hard: you need to find the right people, then come to the table with the right combination of carrots and respect. It’s really easy for an influencer to shut you down with a fast “no” if he or she thinks that you’re insincere, wasting their time or -- even worse -- a potential drag on their brand.
BuzzSumo can’t help you with the latter, but can certainly provide the former. Create outreach lists in BuzzSumo by clicking the link in the Influencers subnav. Simply name a new list, then do an influencer search to start adding names. The data is robust -- BuzzSumo provides page authority, domain authority, followers and Twitter engagement stats, all of which help you separate the influencer wheat from the pretender chaff. You can even download your list as a spreadsheet.
2. Create monitoring alerts. Brand, influencer, keyword and author monitoring all are next-level practices of a good content marketer, but they are also tedious pains in the neck without automated help. There are several free tools that can help with this process (Google Alerts jumps to mind immediately) but BuzzSumo offers a monitoring service that couples tracking info with rich social data.
Click the Monitoring tab in the main nav, then select Create New Alert from the left rail. You’ll be able to monitor up to 10 unique brand mentions, competitor mentions, website content, keywords, backlinks or authors. This info can be delivered as a handy email or you can view the numbers directly in the BuzzSumo app. Much easier than endless Google searches and spreadsheet copy-and-pasting.
3. Use the Trending Now tool. If your content work requires you to keep a close eye on what’s trending around the world, or knowing what is being shared most aggressively, pop into the Trending Now tab (found under Content Research). While trend-hopping can be a dangerous game, it’s always helpful to know what people are talking about online without getting sucked into the Buzzfeed vortex.
4. Check backlinks. Backlinks are the gold standard of organic SEO (well, one of the gold standards). BuzzSumo allows you to search any URL or domain for backlinks, which can be helpful when you’re trying to figure out how and why certain pieces of content are sitting high atop the Google mountain. This is also a nice way to do a little competition intelligence and see some of the relationships your competitors have with other web publishers.
CAVEAT: I’ve found that BuzzSumo’s results are sometimes significantly different from what I’ve found on SEMrush.com. I would not rely exclusively on BuzzSumo as my backlink checker, but rather as a quick reference tool, especially if SEMrush.com is not in your content marketing budget.
5. Read the BuzzSumo blog. Wait, BuzzSumo has a blog? I know that many of us just like to use the content research tools, but the blog is actually a great tool, as well. Posts range from best practices for platforms like Facebook, content case studies, research-driven insights and more.
This isn’t light reading - the bulk of these posts fall between 1,000 and 3,000 words. Which I know because…
6. BuzzSumo has a nice domain comparison tool. If you click Content Analysis in the Content Research subnav, you can access the BuzzSumo Domain Comparison tool. It’s a great way to see how your own blog stacks up against your direct competition or the major players in the industry. BuzzSumo provides the average shares by network, content type and content length for the past year.
7. Parse your content research by content type. As mentioned above, the most popular way to use BuzzSumo is probably just searching for most-shared content or influencers. BuzzSumo also offers an easy way to see specific types of content within a given topic, as well. Let’s say you wanted to find guest posting opportunities for your moms blog. Search “mom tips,” for example, under Most Shared in the Content Research subnav and use the Content Type menu on the left rail to look exclusively for Guest Posts. You now have a list of outlets that accept guest posts -- and authors who write them, too.
8. Find the gaps in your own social program. Are you regularly searching your own content on BuzzSumo? If not, you should. The results allow you to see where you’re strong -- for example, you may be doing great on Facebook -- and where you’re struggling. Maybe you need to invest more time in Pinterest. Maybe LinkedIn is an untapped resource. Maybe you need to invest heavily in your G+ presence. Well, probably not that one.
9. Use BuzzSumo as a topic generator. When you combine the intelligence garnered from Most Shared content along with the information that your subject matter influencers are sharing, you should be able to quickly develop lists of topics that the market has already proven are shareworthy. Now, it’s up to you to write something interesting.
10. Put BuzzSumo alerts into Slack. If your team uses Slack, you can subscribe to BuzzSumo alerts via RSS. Simply go to the appropriate alert under the Monitoring section, click the RSS tab in the Sort By section and follow the instructions. Your whole team can now keep an eye on brand mentions, shares, competitors and more.
How are you using BuzzSumo? If you have any interesting hacks or counterintuitive methods, share them with us in the Comments section or on Twitter @silverbackstrat.