BuzzSumo Review: Discover The Most Shared Content In Seconds

Last Updated on November 7, 2016

In this BuzzSumo Review you will learn why this is one of the most powerful tools you can use for finding the best and most shared content on the web and social media.

Have you ever wondered what your best, most shared content was? Or perhaps wanted to learn what is working for your competitors.

Do you even know who is sharing your content and on what social media platform?

These are often the key to your success online and help save you crucial money and time.

In fact, with BuzzSumo, you can almost know it all!

Let’s see what it can really do…

What Can BuzzSumo Do For You

I stumbled across BuzzSumo a few weeks ago, and it is a very simple tool with a lot of powerful information.

By using just two simple web pages, you can find out:

• What is popular in a niche
• Who is sharing particular content
• What social media platforms a post is shared on and how many times
• What a particular site’s most shared content was (including yours)
• Where people have been guest posting
• And, much much more!

This kind of data is extremely useful to you and to your business, because with this knowledge you can

• Discover great content to share with your audience
• Find out what is working for you or your competitors
• Find influencers to reach out to and spread your message
• Learn where to focus your attention, and where not to
• Keep track of trends in your niche

And if you pay attention to the BuzzSumo Blog, they will give you even more ideas of how to use their awesome tool.

Let’s Dive into BuzzSumo

You can check out a demonstration I made on the following video, or keep reading for more details (or both!).

The best way to see how this works is with an example.

Say I want to know what is working for a competitor like ProBlogger. (I know, they are not really my competitor – they dominate)

I would take their URL (www.problogger.net) and throw it into BuzzSumo click Search and I would get the following (Click on the image to enlarge):

It shows us:

• The most shared content
• How many shares on each social media platform

You can go a little deeper and

• sort by the social media platform that interests you
• filter by content type (guest posts, infographics, interviews, giveaways etc)
• filter by when the content was published

This kind of information is great for seeing what kinds of content, headlines and topics are engaging people on blogs and on social media, and what is getting shared.

It can also help you understand what content of yours is appealing to your audience or what your competitors are having success with.

Finding the Best Social Media Influencers

One of the great things you can find out on BuzzSumo is who are the top sharers of the best content.

There is a cool little button on the above image called View Sharers (it’s on the left of the social media share counters)

When we click on that we see the following (click to enlarge):

 This information is gold!

What this tells you is who are the top sharers on Twitter (yes only Twitter for now) and lots of useful stats about that person. For example:

• Number of Followers they have
• How often they retweet and reply
• How often people retweet them
• How much authority their website has (page rank etc)

So if you want to reach out to influencers (or just get to know them over coffee) you can find out who is the most effective person to contact.

Knowing how many followers a person has is one thing, but understanding how engaged (replies, retweets) they and their audience are is perhaps even more important.

Influencers Shared Content

You can also drill down even further and see what kinds of content a specific influencer is sharing. If you click on View Links Shared (under the follow button for each person) it will show you a list of links they have shared, and an analysis of the content they shared like this:

This tells us the most shared content for this influencer, which is of course useful for many reasons (find great content to share, ideas on what gets shared etc).

BuzzSumo has more great ideas on using this data in this article.

Why Would You Use BuzzSumo?

I have touched on the idea of investigating your content and that of your competitors, and we have also looked at seeing what influencers are best to reach out to.

But what other uses are there for BuzzSumo?

Here are a few other ideas:

• Finding places to guest post
• Find awesome infographics to share
• Get ideas for trending content in your niche
• Find influencers by niche (use the influencers tab to search)

Of course there are many more great uses, so feel free to share your ideas in the comments.

Summary

BuzzSumo is an easy to use tool to help you find great content, influencers and much more.

Go take a look at it now, and see what it can achieve for you. (Even just knowing what is working for you is great to know)

Let me know what you think in the comments below

Note: I am in no way associated with BuzzSumo, I just love what they are doing!

Photo credit: DogFromSPACE via photopin cc