When you’re juggling a lot of responsibilities and content’s merely one of them, anything that can save you a few minutes (or hours) is worth a second look. I first heard about
BuzzSumo in a Mozinar by Tori Cushing, in which she utilized the tool’s data in creating analytics dashboards. From there, the name just kept popping up so I had to give it a try.
Generating Content Ideas
If you have multiple clients each with a steady stream of content needs, there’s a lot of value in using BuzzSumo’s Content Research tool. Rather than scrambling around for fresh ideas, you can get a bird’s eye view of what people liked so much, they shared it. I use this often for home services topics like HVAC and pest control -- each has their nuances dependent on weather and I can immediately learn whether it’s termite mating season again or if it’s time for readers to clean out their gutters.
Structured like a search engine, you can drop in your topic (and specify a domain if you’d like) to see which articles are shared the most (arguably the best metric in terms of content worthiness). These are broken down by social channels, and you can even drill down to content types like articles, guest posts and infographics. The date range parameters range from past 24 hours to the past year, giving you the option to see what’s trending now and what’s been crushing it over the long term.
Connecting With Influencers
Let’s say your client just came up with a revolutionary baby product that has solved diaper blowouts. To help get the word out, you could go to use the Influencers tool, which will drill down the top Twitter influencers by topic, then let you create contact lists. From there, you can even interact with the influencers within BuzzSumo. Et voila - you have access to the who’s who in the baby gear industry in a matter of minutes.
For those who use paid Twitter marketing, the Audience Builder tool can assist you in saving up users who have shared your content in the past. This enables you to retarget them later if, for example, your client’s diaper product is a finalist to appear on Shark Tank and you want everyone to know about it.
Social Prowess
Have you ever wondered how some of your favorite social media channels seem to always be way, way on top of it? Are they just constantly plugged into pop culture and super nimble at connecting the latest celebrity breakup with barbecue wings? Er, maybe so but for the rest of us there’s the Trending Now tool. One of my favorite features of this tool is that you can drill down to topics like Health and Tech - in case, for example, you tire of digging through sports and political news.
What’s your favorite content marketing tool? Let us know and maybe we’ll feature it on the Leadhub blog!