Bloggers and content marketers are starting to pay a lot of attention to a fabulous content development tool called Buzzsumo. And with good reason! Buzzsumo is a content development and research tool that is worthy of praise.
I fell in love with the tool (yes — I admit that I'm in love with online software) while it was still in beta back in 2014 and apparently I'm not alone, because it's been featured everywhere from Ian Cleary's Razor Social to Mike Stelzner's Social Media Examiner and this incredible tool even shows up as the subject of a Marketing Course on Lynda.com.
At this point, you're probably wondering, what's all the buzz about Buzzsumo. There's so many ways you can benefit from having this tool in your arsenal, so without further ado, here's:
10 Ways to Generate Viral Content Using Buzzumo!
![What's All the Buzz About Buzzsumo [Infographic]](https://i0.wp.com/basicblogtips.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Whats-All-the-Buzz-About-Buzzsumo.jpg?resize=525%2C788)
Discover Your Most Shared Blog Post
Log in, go to the “Top Content” tab and enter your domain. You can filter your search by hour, week, month or drill down to specific date range. Searches can also be broken down based on the type of content you've published. For example filter by: videos, interviews, Infographics and more.
You can get a good idea what the interface is like in this video titled Buzzsumo Introduction (read the transcript below).
Each one of your viral content searches has the option to find the influencers who shared the article on Twitter. Users are listed by number of Twitter followers, engagement, domain authority and page authority.
Explore New Topic and Title Ideas
Researching content by topic easily helps you find what's trending across your niche and you might be surprised at what you'll discover. According to Sharon Hurley Hall in an article on The Daily Egg:
When you start marketing with content, you probably have some idea of the topics around which you want to create content. What you don’t know is whether others will find them interesting.
Use BuzzSumo to check this out by doing a topic search. Put your search terms in the search box and the results you get will show whether your topic is popular and what kind of content has already been posted on that topic.
Research Potential Guest Authors
This one has saved me a lot of grief already! I'm so fond of this I recorded a video that is available only to those who sign up for my online training school called Get Ready to Learn with Ileane Smith (more details to come on the school in an upcoming blog post). Here's a coupon for the course because if you're still with me at this point in the post, you deserve to get access to the mini-course for free. 🙂
Honestly, I have researched quite a few of my guest authors with Buzzsumo (I've rejected a few based on what I found there too!) and it's so much easier than trying to do a Google search.
Find Viral Content You Shared
From the Influencer's tab enter your Twitter handle -> then click on “View Links Shared” to see what's hot in your stream. There's another handy chart you can download that will show you the domains you're tweeting about. Check it to see if you're following the 80/20 rule – just for fun!
Determine the Best Day of the Week to Publish
Wondering what day of the week you should publish new blog posts? Based on this handy chart, Monday's seem to get more shares here on Basic Blog Tips, but I might want to switch things up and publish on a day with fewer shares to even things out. Not surprised to see that most of the shares happen on Twitter but really blown away by the fact that there's a surge in Facebook shares on Thursday (still scratching my head over that one) 🙂 
Compare Any Two Domains
The domain reports cover 6 areas :
- Average shares by network
- Average shares by content type
- Shares by date published
- Average shares by content length
- Popular topics by domain
- Top shared content
Enter two domains for a head-to-head comparison. Come back and let me know what you find, ok?
Find Content Gaps
What's a good length for your articles? What type of content gets shared the most? Important questions that you can easily find answers to in Buzzsumo. Here's a report which shows posts that are 1,000 – 2,000 words long do well on this blog. That's also the content that seems to be going well over on Facebook. Maybe I need to do more of those posts, on the other hand I need to take a closer look at why the posts in the 2,000 – 3,000 words range aren't getting Pins on Pinterest. 
Refresh Old Content with Infographics & Videos
Now that Buzzsumo helped me hone in on a Content Gap where Pinterest shares are lacking, it's time for me to get cracking by reviving some old posts with updated images or Infographics. By the way, speaking of Infographics what do you think of the one I included in this post? It's from the talented and lovely Pauline Cabrera from Twelveskip .
She's the bomb, isn't she?
Set up Alerts and RSS Feeds
You can shut off your Google Alerts, ignore TalkWalker and cancel your account with Mention. Seriously.
I know that I've recommended these tools in the past but I'm currently running all of them and NOTHING beats the speed and accuracy of Buzzsumo. Not even close.
Take any alert you create in Buzzsumo and turn it into an RSS feed. If you're already familiar with using IFTTT then you realize that this opens up a lot of possibilities! If you're not sure with IFTTT is read this. In a nutshell you can do some really cool tricks like send out a Tweet or post to Tumblr every time your blog is mentioned. If that sounds scary, try setting up IFTTT to send you a text message each time you get new backlink!
NEW! Trending Content
Steve Rayson, director over at Buzzsumo does a fantastic job in this video introducing us to the Trending Content feature that's currently in beta. I'm already having fun with this feature and I know you'll find some real content gems here, especially if you like to curate great content like I do.
Have you tried Buzzsumo yet? What do you think of it? Share your favorite feature with us in the comments.
Transcript for Buzzsumo Introduction Video
Just in case you've never seen Buzzsumo and you don't know what it's about. I came into the tool and I typed in my blog.
What happens as you're going to see all the shares and what posts on your blog were shared the most. So for example you'll see the number of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest or Google+ shares.
This way you can sort by any column for example I like to sort by the Pinterest to see – now I know that this post was about Pinterest so I'm not surprised that has the most pins on my blog over the last year. Now there's another thing you can do here you can change that time period. Let's say I just want to see over the past month. Change that filter it down. Now what's really great about getting these little reports here?
First of all if you want you can export them and play around with them in a spreadsheet if you want. But you can also see areas where your blog is weak. For example LinkedIn I don't get that many shares on LinkedIn but that’s intentional because I have my work stuff on LinkedIn and I don't want to confuse the two. But maybe for you it maybe Facebook. You want to put a little bit more effort in Facebook. Now let me show you another quick thing. You can go in here click on “View Sharers”. Now I just want to know you can do this for any blog it does not have to be your own blog I just so happen to use my blog for example. If you find that there’s someone who has a lot of followers– here you can see their followers their domain authority.
Like for example Ann Smarty she's one of my buddies. I even mention Viral Content Buzz in the interview as one of the tools I'm using and Ann Smarty is the developer of that tool. And, you know she has a lot of followers on Twitter so if I wasn't following her already I would certainly follow her and reach out and connect. And that's how you can use — just a little snippet of how you can use Buzzsumo in order to improve on your content make sure that if there's any gaps or any social sites where you're not getting that many shares if you wanna grow that network then you go ahead and you start concentrating on that. But connect with these influencers on Twitter if that's your goal.
Recommended Reading:
- The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business
- Ten Things Every Successful Entrepreneur Knows that the Rest of the World Doesn't: Ten Easy Steps to Create a Successful and Sustainable Business
- How To Blog For Profit: Without Selling Your Soul
Watch the extended Buzzsumo tutorial and Q&A:
How to Use Buzzsumo for Content Research by MsIleaneSpeaks