BuzzSumo Review (Features, Pricing, Alternatives)

Wondering if BuzzSumo can turn your marketing agency into quite the buzz?

BuzzSumo is a popular content and SEO (search engine optimization) platform for discovering the best content and outreach opportunities. You can also use it to explore topics that are trending now across Google search and social media.

If you’re a content marketer, this tool can come in handy to help you execute all your digital marketing strategies.

In this BuzzSumo review, we’ll cover what BuzzSumo is, the five cool things you can do with this great tool, and its pricing. We’ll also discuss its limitations and suggest a few alternatives.

This Article Contains: 

(Click on the links below to jump to a specific section)

• What is BuzzSumo?
• 5 Things You Can Do With BuzzSumo
• How Much Does BuzzSumo Cost?
• 2 Limitations of Using BuzzSumo
• 2 Alternatives to BuzzSumo
• Will BuzzSumo Generate a Buzz For Your Business? 

Alright, let’s get buzzing!

What is BuzzSumo?

BuzzSumo is a cloud-based keyword research and content analysis tool that can help any blogger or content marketer improve their content marketing strategies.

The tool can help you with content analysis, content discovery, social media monitoring, and influencer research.

However, the real strength of this SEO and social media platform lies in how you use it and what you wish to achieve.

BuzzSumo can be used to:

• Explore a new content idea
• Create an organic content strategy
• Analyze your competitor
• Discover trending content
• Manage the content curation process
• Monitor social media mentions
• Monitor your content’s performance on any social channel
• Manage keyword research

…And more! 

Additionally, if you ever need some help getting around the tool, you can open a chat with their customer support staff on any page. Alternatively, you can send their customer support team an email.

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To get a better idea of what you can do with marketing software, let’s look at its features.

5 Awesome Things You Can Do With BuzzSumo

Here are five unique BuzzSumo features you and your digital marketing team will buzz about:

1. Content Analysis

BuzzSumo’s Content Analysis report lets you explore the web for any content that contains your search term. You get the search results and the total engagement associated with your search result. 

Imagine knowing what pieces of content have acquired the most social engagement and links in real-time!

That’s powerful ammo for planning and producing engaging content that interests your target audience.

The Content Analysis report also comes with unique filters that you can use for effective content curation. Some of them include:

• Date: See results from a particular day, week, or month. Or opt for a custom date range.
• Day of Publishing: Shows you if any topic performs better on specific weekdays. This filter is excellent for social media campaigns. 
• Content Length: Determines if long-form content is essential to rank.
• Country: Show results from a specific country.
• Language: Displays results by language.
• Domain: Show results by one or more domains, separated by a comma.
• Word Count: View only elaborate articles or eliminate thin content.
• Network: Find out which social network or networks share similar trending content.
• Social share: See which websites have shared your Facebook posts and manage your Twitter retweets. You can use this social share data to understand the engaging content websites are looking for. 
• Content type: Displays results based on the content type, such as blog, how-to article, video, infographic, listicle, and etc. Here you can learn what type of content will likely resonate with your target audience.

2. Narrow Down Content Research Results

With BuzzSumo’s Advanced Search feature, marketers can make more specific search queries that go beyond a simple topic or long-tail keyword. 

For example, if you exclude “youtube.com,” the search results won’t show you any video matches from YouTube.

Apart from excluding words or domains, here’s are some other searches you can run: 

• URL or domain search
• Specific phrase search
• Searching by multiple words
• Find top authors
• Search trending topics by the domain (for example, instagram.com influencer marketing)
• Search for multiple domains
• View links shared by Twitter usernames you enter

3. Competitor Content Research

It’s essential to keep an eye on your competitors. 👀 That’s how you can be prepared when they employ a new content marketing strategy.

Fortunately, BuzzSumo lets you take a sneak-a-peek at what your competitors are doing from a content marketing perspective. This way, you can benchmark effectively against the right competitors.

Here’s how you can use BuzzSumo for competitor content research:

• Keep a tab on your competitor’s publishing strategy. You can do this by entering your competitor’s domain in the Content Analysis search bar. It’ll reveal the number of articles they publish, average shares, average engagement, and more. You can use this data to develop a new content idea or replicate your competitor’s content strategy.

• Analyze the social media networks and the type of content proving successful for your competitors. You can also review their trending content based on engagement.

• Find influencers who share your competitor’s content the most. You can filter the shared content list by the number of followers or engagement. Next, you should contact the top influencers about your own content so they can share your content instead. 

• Set up a competitor content alert notification to immediately know when a competitor publishes content. BuzzSumo’s content alerts are similar to Google Alerts and can be emailed to you.
  
• Finally, know where you stand compared to your competitors. For this nail-biting moment of truth, go to the Content Analyzer and enter your website into the search bar. Then, enter your competitor’s website to the add comparison field. You can use these comparative metrics to develop an informed content strategy for your site.

4. Explore Questions Related to Your Business

One of the biggest secrets for ranking high on search engines is to answer questions frequently asked by many people. 

And it’s not easy to come up with content ideas that answer relevant questions because there are millions and millions of questions out there!

Thankfully, BuzzSumo’s Question Analyzer lets you search for questions related to your enterprise or topic. This way, you can create a new content plan that focuses on answering relevant questions.

All you have to do is:

• Do a keyword search on a topic that’s relevant to your business
• Then click a tab that has all questions related to your topic

This list of questions can help with content creation and idea generation.

Where does BuzzSumo get the questions? 

It extracts them from your favorite forums, including Quora, Amazon, and Reddit. 

Moreover, the Question Analyzer can help with brand monitoring. You can discover brand mentions and find out what people online are asking regarding your brand.

5. Discover Key Influencers

In social media marketing, many content marketers are making their brand names known via influencer marketing. This involves contacting authoritative voices in your business or social network and convincing them to promote your business. 

Fortunately, BuzzSumo understands how valuable influencer marketing is. Consequently, they have an influencer marketing feature to help you identify key influencers for content promotion. 

To find a valuable influencer across any social media platform, enter a topic or domain relevant to your enterprise in the Content Analyzer space. That’ll generate a list of your most shared content.

Then click the view top sharers icon next to any article headline. 

Doing so will show you a list of the influencers that have already shared that specific headline on Twitter.

These are the people you need to contact, so they can start making you famous!

BuzzSumo also offers insightful influencer metrics like:

• Domain Authority: This is a score developed by Moz that determines how well a site will rank on search engines.
• Page Authority: A score, also developed by Moz, that predicts how well a specific page will rank on search engines
• Reply ratio: The percentage of tweets sent by the user that receive replies
• Average retweets: The average number of retweets the user gets per tweet

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But even if you become a celebrity, you don’t want BuzzSumo’s pricing plans to break the bank, right?

So, let’s find out how much these features cost.

How Much Does BuzzSumo Cost?

BuzzSumo offers four plans:

• Free:
  • One user
  • 10 searches/month
  • Content analysis reports
  • Influencer searches
  • Journalist profiles

• Pro ($99/month): 
  • Five users
  • Unlimited searches/month
  • Domain reports
  • 50 exports/month
  • Unlimited projects and items

• Plus ($179/month):
  • 10 users
  • Question analyzer
  • Backlinks
  • Author search
  • 10 content alerts (social media shares, mentions, etc.)

• Large ($299/month): 
  • 15 users 
  • Facebook analyzer
  • Top author search
  • YouTube analyzer 
  • Influencer searches

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Now the question is, is BuzzSumo all about the buzz, or does it have its drawbacks ready to cause a fuss?

2 Limitations of Using BuzzSumo

Even though it’s a great content marketing tool, BuzzSumo has its share of drawbacks.

1. Pricey

BuzzSumo may be a great tool for content marketing, but it can also be costly for small businesses. 

But the good news is, you can always opt for the 30-day trial period to test the waters and see if it’s actually worth the price. Additionally, you can use the free plan until you’re ready to commit to a paid one.

2. Complex User Interface

Many users complain that, at times, the interface can be challenging to manage. 

And all the different tabs like discover, influencers, content, etc., look the same when you run a search, which can get confusing for new users.

Fortunately, BuzzSumo has insightful blogs and a comprehensive knowledge base that you can use to get the hang of the tool in no time!

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Next, in this BuzzSumo review, we’ll check out two alternative tools that might be buzz-worthy.

2 Alternatives of BuzzSumo

Here are two other tools that can make your business the talk of the town:

1. Content Studio

Content Studio is a powerful content marketing tool that helps content marketers and website owners manage social media campaigns and churn out relevant content.

Marketers can use this content research tool to predict if their content ideas will go viral or become popular content with social engagement data before they publish it. Some of its best functions include:

• Planner and calendar
• Workflow automation
• Content discovery and insights
• Multi-channel composer
• Approval workflows
• Analytics and reporting

However, Content Studio’s mobile app isn’t as intuitive as the desktop app. As a result, it can be challenging to manage workflows via the mobile app.

2. Social Animal

Social Animal is a content marketing and social media monitoring software that lets marketers search for relevant content and learn how it performs across multiple platforms. 

The tool also helps marketers discover popular content pieces, influencers, dig into social media insights, monitor competitors, and more… till they can say:

Additionally, the digital marketing tool integrates with Google Analytics and has a Facebook analyzer tool that automatically posts for you and helps you monitor your social media traffic. 

On the downside, Social Animal doesn’t offer a free plan. However, every paid plan comes with a 14-day free trial. This way, you’ll know if this content marketing tool has all the required functions to help your website spread its wings and reach the top of Google’s search results. 

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Will BuzzSumo Generate a Buzz For Your Business? 

As the same suggests, BuzzSumo is a digital marketing tool that can generate the right buzz for your website.

With features like Content Analysis, Trending Content search, Competitor Analysis, Influencer search, and more, this content research tool is the complete package for any content creator or influencer.

But if you’re looking for expert content strategy advice or need some help with crafting a fantastic content marketing strategy, connect with the SEO specialists at Startup Voyager.

Our SEO experts can help you compose high-ranking content and build a conversion-based SEO strategy to attract tons of organic traffic to your website!