Buzzsumo is the best tool we’ve found for analyzing content performance across multiple channels, and discovering proven viral content.

Content Analyzer

It’s very simple to use. First of all you insert a keyword or a domain in the content search bar (see image below) and the application will spit out a list of content related to that topic or all content released by that domain, in the time period you have selected.

As you can see, the content is analyzed by Total Engagements (usually shares and likes), including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Links and it also gives you an evergreen score, which means it analyzes the content and sees which content is not bound by a specific timeframe and thus can possibly be re-used in your own properties.

Knowing which content is proven to attract likes and shares in a specific platform opens up a world of different possibilities to content creators, be it creating original but similar content based on proven viral articles, just sharing these articles on your properties, or a little more evolved strategy that I’ve seen some people using on Facebook: “steal” a piece of content, post it on your Facebook page and try to make it go viral again by kickstarting it with some Facebook Ads in order to gain traction.

There is also plenty of search refining features, such as searching only for content from a certain country in case you’re targeting international markets, showing only B2B publishers, filtering by word count, type of content and type of publisher.

Another very useful thing is that you can discover which content performs better in a given social network. For example I’ve noticed from using Buzzsumo that Infographics perform incredibly well on Pinterest as well as Reddit, but not so well in other platforms. Therefore if I was running a Pinterest page, you bet my focus would be on producing a couple of relevant infographics per week and share them with my followers.

An insane feature in Buzzsumo, is that you cannot only see stats on how much the content was shared, but you can actually see who shared it! This basically transforms Buzzsumo in an Encyclopedia documenting an entire history of Who shared what.

So just think of the possibility of when you publish a similar article reaching out to twitter users that have shared similar content before to see if they can share your link as well.

Question Analyzer

Another cool feature is the addition of the question analyzer in order to track questions being asked in different mediums.

This is a cool way to gain backlinks and increase traffic to your site, by just answering questions that may be related to your content or your company and then including a link back to your site. And while you could probably do this in Google, Buzzsumo allows you to filter the questions by subtopic, date, and domain where the questions have been published.

 

Trending Content

There is also a feature to see what content has been trending in the past X days by number of engagements, which I believe you’ll also find on competitors, but it’s important nonetheless if you wish to be among the first to act on a piece of news that is gaining steam on social media.

Backlink Analyzer

There is also a backlink analyzer, and while there are hundreds out there, this one ranks the linking pages by total engagements.

 

Influencers

Another cool feature is to search for influencers in a particular niche or that identified with a certain keyword in the bio.

In this case we ran a search for Angel investor, and a huge list of Twitter accounts of people who identify as Angel Investors came up.

Monitoring

Lastly there’s the monitoring feature that allows you to monitor your site or a competitor site to see what they have been sharing, what links they have been building/gaining and pretty much just reverse engineer their entire social strategy, and which pieces of content have performed best for them.

 

Conclusion

Buzzsumo is the most powerful tool for content analysis that we have ever came across, seeing it records pretty much all social signals going in and out of a particular domain or social page. But while it opens a whole world of possibilities to any content marketer, and I’m sure will save any marketer a vast amount of time and money, it still requires you to be smart and come up with different strategies how to best utilize this information on your own business.