Every day, various brands reach out to top influencers like Cristiano Ronaldo, the Kardashians, and David Beckham, to do affiliate marketing.
While creating my website when I learned this, I thought, “How can I apply their strategy in making my own website as high-tier as my competitors?”
Later, when I was catching up on SEO, I found a tool to help me gain leverage from a partnership between my brand and any influencer. That tool was BuzzSumo and since then I have been quite fond of it!
Today, I’ll be discussing BuzzSumo’s features and functions and review its pros and cons for users.
About BuzzSumo
Brandwatch, a London-based social intelligence company, is the mastermind behind this software suite. Following their industry experience that helped Whirlpool, Walmart, and Dell grow, their product serves as the capstone for their users in order to increase their productivity, workflow, and content success.
Features
This software suite includes four main elements that will help you learn the current trend in content across social platforms and search results. It will help you keep track of your website’s growth and learn strategies from your competition at the same time.
Discovery
This section on BuzzSumo it shows all the up-to-date content depending on which one of these three tabs you want to select:
- Trends
- Topics
- Questions
Let’s have a look at them individually.
Trends
This subcategory of Trends in BuzzSumo displays a list of different articles with their respective metrics such as its trending score and engagement.
As an example, we have one of the results that can appear on their platform.
The labeled circles are what one can see for each result they show in this module. In order, they are:
- Title of article
- Author
- Date Posted
- Origin website
- Number of shares to Facebook
- Number of shares to Twitter
- Number of shares to Pinterest
- Number of shares to Reddit
- Links that can be found within the article
- Evergreen score
- Total Engagement
- Save to a BuzzSumo project
- Share results
Among these, there are two items that can only be found within this application: Evergreen score and Total Engagement.
Evergreen score, as defined by its developers, is the app’s own ranking score based on the number of shares on social media and backlinks it has received within one month after it is published.
Total Engagement, on the other hand, specifies the amount of overall interaction between social sites from the specified article alone.
Topics
This part of the application focuses on which keywords or topics are available amongst their massive database. Below is an example of how this section looks.
This part informs the users about which topics using the entered keyword produce the most traffic.
A result from this screen can look something like this:
These can be retrieved either from popular articles that talk about the keyword, critical questions asked in forums about the keyword, or related keywords people are searching.
It consists of the following elements:
- Phrase that contains the specified topic or keyword you entered earlier
- Article that talks about the phrase
- Question that is related to the phrase
- Keywords that are linked to the phrase
- Other ideas that BuzzSumo can recommend as content starters
Questions
This part of the module lets you search by keyword or phrase to learn what are the most common questions about the topic. You can sort the results, as shown by the screen above, by time, country, site type, and sources.
Research
While the previous module in BuzzSumo asks you for data based on forum questions and articles about the topic, this section focuses on the effect of these articles on its social media audience.
It is divided into three smaller modules:
- Web
- Backlinks
Web
The left-most tab in this section, as shown in the picture below, can help you learn how popular a certain keyword is based on the number of clicks amassed by the articles regarding the keyword or topic.
✋ Stop worrying about SEO and have me do it for you
PS: Ready to work with the 0.01% of all SEOs worldwide? Click here.
After entering a word or phrase in its search box, it shows a chart of published articles and the times any of them were shared. Using a database of 5 million articles spanning domains and time, BuzzSumo can deliver up-to-date content that website owners, including you, can use for audience research.
This result can also be filtered based on several filters, such as by country, language, and month.
Meanwhile, this feature of this system filters only content that has been produced within Facebook. As shown by the sample screen below, its search results are similar to those of the Discover module.
This screen shows the frequency of visitor interactions, the times they have reacted, shared, and/or commented on the content.
Backlinks
This part of the module features a screen similar to the one shown below. Unlike the previous parts, this focuses on which links are used within each article.
Aside from that, it also shows a detailed list of engagement with the audience based on their specific platform of choice (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or Reddit). Aside from that, you can also do the following:
- Follow articles to monitor their growth
- Be notified of any new links created on followed articles
- Export the results as an Excel file
Influencers
In this section, I will feature BuzzSumo’s pool of information that introduces a list of various influencers that you can utilize for your content. A common strategy when using this information, you can opt to create strong partnerships with them to increase both your visibility among your respective audiences.
There are three parts that make up this module as a whole:
- Authors
In this tab, you can visit which influencer from this platform drives the most engagement over time by including the following metrics:
- Page Authority – a score originally developed by Moz that predicts how well the page will rank on search engines.
- Domain Authority – another Moz score that predicts how the webpage will rank on search engines.
- Followers – the number of followers the influencer has.
- Retweet Ratio – how much of the influencer’s tweets are retweets from other Twitter users.
- Reply Ratio – how much of the influencer’s tweets are retweeted from other Twitter users.
- Average Retweets – a number based on the influencer’s total number of retweets of their own content by Twitter users.
As shown in the example screen above, you can have the option to search among their database of influencers based on whether their profile includes a certain keyword or whether their content contains that keyword. It also includes several filters, including by country and activity.
Similar to how the Twitter part of this module works, this screen shows information about different influencers hailing from Facebook. You enter a phrase or keyword that appears either in their description or in their content and it will show you the results.
You can also find how many likes they have garnered in their respective pages and filter depending on relevance and languages. Aside from that, you can also find out which of their content boosts their competitor’s content, which will be useful for backlinks for your future content.
Authors
The influencers featured here are those who produce the relevant articles throughout the Internet. If you try to look up, say “digital marketing,” on this screen, it will produce a list of people who have written about it before.
You can also browse which specific article they have written and learn its evergreen score, engagement score across different platforms, in addition to the backlinks present in said content. BuzzSumo also includes filters to search for language, domains, and total engagement for every result.
Monitoring
This feature tracks all saved search results gathered following the research. This module in the software suite helps you track all the information you have saved during your use of this tool.
There are three parts to this: keywords, authors & outlets, and backlinks.
Keywords
For this part, you can choose between a combination or brands and/or trending topics. You can simply navigate to the “Create New Alert,” enter the brand name to be followed and add in the email you want to receive the alerts from.
Authors & Outlets
This part of the module lets you keep alerts of whether a certain influencer or author has written about your brand, products, and/or articles. Creating one is as simple as making a keyword alert too.
Backlinks
Finally, this module takes care of monitoring how well your website’s articles have engaged its users. Aside from that, you can also set up an alert to know which person browsing search results or social media content said something about your content as well.
Aside from that, it includes the following information as well:
- Engagement across Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Reddit
- Number of links that were made with it
- Evergreen score
Pricing
As mentioned earlier in this review, BuzzSumo is not available for free. Its plans range from $79 to $499+ per month, depending on which features you want in-store. If you’re going to try out its features, you can opt for a trial version first to get used to it for your growth strategy.
If you are planning to get this product, do take note that their Pro plan does not include the Question Analyzer, Youtube Analyzer, Facebook Analyzer, Top Author Search, and Advanced Trending Filters. Getting these features would require you to start paying at least $140 to $499+ as you invest in a Plug, Large, or Enterprise plan.
Strengths
Looking back at it as a whole, I find it satisfying to learn that I can export any of my search results to an Excel file, filter my results by domain, and filter my results by language. Doing this can also help me think about localizing my growth strategy by targeting a particular country.
Aside from that, I find it unique that there are notifications from different writers across several industries. Knowing this, I can think of a lot of possible backlinks to increase my visibility for my future content.
Also, read Ezoic review here and know how to increase your earnings per thousand visitors
Weaknesses
So far, they have included data from several social pages, as I have discussed in the previous sections. It would be great to include information from websites such as LinkedIn or WordPress.
Doing this will help them get a better scope of the social media audience as well.
Aside from that, it would be a tool that only website owners who actively apply SEO to their website’s growth strategy. Meaning, there is both a learning curve to actively use this tool for its true purpose.
Wrapping Up!
In summary, BuzzSumo is a software suite dedicated to helping direct yourself to which topics, influencers, and authors to follow. Aside from that, it provides a helpful hint based on their current data on how to write the next article that will bring the most engagement to your website and your visitors.
Overall, this is a good product that can contribute to the success of many website owners. However, do keep in mind that you have to pay for this service for either monthly or yearly. Aside from that, you would have to learn how SEO works to make use of its features in the long run proactively.
I do hope that my review of BuzzSumo helped you in your decision in investing in your website. Speaking of websites, learn more on how to make it grow by reading these articles:
- 5 Must-Try Content Marketing Trends in 2020
- Tips to Make Money on Snapchat
- The Best-Paying Adsense Keywords
Have you used BuzzSumo before? Share your experience in the comments below.
