Why Buzzsumo Is More Awesome Than You Think – Here's Why #166

Why Buzzsumo Is More Awesome Than You Think – Here's Why #166

For many marketers, Buzzsumo has become the go-to tool for evaluating how content performs on social media. But few know the full power of the site that goes far beyond measuring social engagement.

In this episode of the popular Here's Why digital marketing video series, Stone Temple's Mark Traphagen takes you on a whirlwind tour of some of his favorite features in Buzzsumo, and shows you how it can help stimulate your content marketing juices.

DISCLAIMER: Mark Traphagen, Eric Enge, and Stone Temple Consulting have no compensated business relationship with Buzzsumo or it's owner, Brandwatch. We just think Buzzsumo is awesome!

Don't miss a single episode of Here's Why with Mark & Eric. Click the subscribe button below to be notified via email each time a new video is published. Over a half million views on YouTube!

Subscribe to Here's Why

Resources

See all of our Here's Why Videos | Subscribe to our YouTube Channel Content, Shares, and Links: Insights from Analyzing 1 Million Articles Buzzsumo

Transcript

Eric: Mark, you wanted to show us some cool things about Buzzsumo, right?

Mark: Yes. But before we start, I just want our audience to know that this is an unsolicited, uncompensated review of their product. We just happen to think it's awesome. And I want to show our viewers that it does a lot more than they might know.

Eric: Okay, great. So let's start with what Buzzsumo is.

Mark: Well, most people who know about Buzzsumo probably think of it as a tool for measuring the amount of social activity shared or earned by content on the web. Of course, it's awesome at that.

Eric: With Buzzsumo, you can enter any topic and see the most shared content for it broken down by shares per social network, as you see below:

Mark: Yes. And you can also search by domain to see what content has performed the best on your own site or the site of a competitor. Or use Buzzsumo's advanced search operators to filter in other ways. For example, using the “author:” operator, I can see my most shared content for the past five years:

Eric: A lot to explore there for sure, but I know you wanted to show us some of the lesser known but still awesome things you can do with Buzzsumo.

Mark: Well there's a lot, so I'll stick to a few highlights and encourage our viewers to explore on their own. The newest addition to Buzzsumo is their Evergreen Score. Basically the higher the number, the longer a life the content has had on social media. Below is the Evergreen Score for TechCrunch for the past year:

Mark: You can see that a post about Facebook from last June has the highest Evergreen Score. That means that it continues to be shared right up to the present. The score rates higher posts that continue to get high levels of social engagement over time with a weighting toward recency.

Eric: That's cool. So what are some other kinds of metrics we can look at in Buzzsumo?

Mark: Well, I think one of the most interesting is the content analyzer. Below is the social performance of the content on our own site in aggregate over the past year:

Mark: You can see which networks gave us the most shares, what types of content were most engaging for us, what days of the week are most productive, how content length affects sharing, and much more. Here's an interesting stat: our posts of over 3,000 words get 30% more shares than any of our content shorter than that.

Eric: Well that would be our research studies. One of the kinds of content that a joint Buzzsumo and Moz study said tends to be able to get more shares as well as more links.

Mark: Now our time is short, so let me just give a taste of some of the other yummy data you can get from Buzzsumo.

Now one that I love is their Facebook analyzer. Put in a Facebook page and you can see the post that got the most interactions or drill down to sort by likes, comments, or shares. You can also get charts and graphs of your pages' trends over time in a format much easier to access than Facebook's insights.

There are so many other things that you can do with Buzzsumo, such as finding out who the most shared influencers are in a topic, seeing mentions of your brand and who is linking to your content, and even an incredible questions analyzer that searches hundreds of thousands of forums, as well as Reddit, Quora, and Amazon to help you discover what people were asking about a topic.

Eric: It's a great way to uncover what kind of content you ought to be producing.

Mark: So there you have it. My whirlwind tour of some of my favorite things about Buzzsumo. Now I encourage our viewers to go to Buzzsumo.com, set up an account (you can try it for free) and start exploring.

Eric: Thanks, Mark.

Don't miss a single episode of Here's Why with Mark & Eric. Click the subscribe button below to be notified via email each time a new video is published.

Subscribe to Here's Why

See all of our Here's Why Videos | Subscribe to our YouTube Channel