BuzzSumo Tool Review | Scripted

If you've ever put time and energy into creating a piece of content, only to have it tank, BuzzSumo's value proposition will probably catch your attention. This content research platform helps you identify trending topics, hashtags, and keywords proactively, so you can create timely, relevant, and engaging content more often, taking out the guesswork and increasing the success of everything you put out there.

Four key components make up the BuzzSumo platform, and it's trusted by countless companies — including top names, like Expedia and Hubspot — so here's what you need to know about this suite of tools.

What to Consider When Looking for a Content Research Solution

BuzzSumo is not the only tool of its kind. In fact, you could achieve a similar outcome if you put in the legwork to do the research on your own using a combination of free analytics tools. Of course, what makes BuzzSumo special, is that it's supposed to combine the most meaningful and effective tools and strategies into one easy-to-use, quick, and simple platform.

If you're looking for a content research tool to help you plan more engaging content, BuzzSumo is sure to come up on your list. There are four parts to the tool, with the first being the "Discovery" function that helps you find the most relevant, popular, and trending pieces of content in your niche so you can boost interactions. The next part is the "Research" tool, which allows you to analyze all sorts of data and information to improve your marketing approach.

These two core functionalities are something you should seek out in any content research tool, but BuzzSumo takes it a bit further, sweetening the deal and improving functionality with the other two tools: influencers and monitoring. The former helps you easily find up-and-coming and influential social media users in your niche, so you can find collaboration and sponsorship opportunities. The latter helps you track your content's performance over time, so you can fine-tune your marketing strategy.

Ultimately, if you're looking for an in-depth, "all-in-one" type of content research tool, BuzzSumo is likely your best choice.

Features and Benefits of BuzzSumo

Generating thousands of relevant keywords, coming up with a list of your industry's top trending influencers, and identifying just the perfect topic to write about in your next blog post are just some of the functions built into BuzzSumo.

The tool's powers start with the content discovery feature, which is more than just a fancied up keyword research tool. In addition to monthly search volume, BuzzSumo will give you full insights into a list of keywords, showing real-time results, geographic filtering, and even predicting viral trends.

From there, the content research tool allows you to identify the best format for your content, compare it to your competitor's top content, and look back at years of data to help you produce the best content out there. Social engagement and backlink tools will help your content perform once it goes live, too.

Add to these features the opportunity to encourage shares, collaborate with influencers, and track your content's performance in the long run, and BuzzSumo is one of the best be all, end all type solutions on the market for your content strategy.

Pros of BuzzSumo

Discover and analyze keywords in great detail, going past "monthly search volume" to predict viral hits, make use of geographical filtering, and display real-time results.
Plan content more powerfully by comparing the best formats for a given article, looking at competitors' content in a new light, and informing your strategy with years of data.
Reach out to influencers who are trending in your industry, allowing you to target users with massive growth potential and make better use of your budget.
Use advanced analytics and monitoring to track the performance of your content over time, helping you fine-tune your marketing strategy.

Cons of BuzzSumo

Some users feel that BuzzSumo has tried to do too much, perhaps too fast, and that has led to a less-than-intuitive user interface, particularly for non-techy users. You may struggle to find what you need, making for a learning curve, and you may feel that the platform simply offers too many options, spreading it out rather than focusing on one thing.
BuzzSumo isn't ideal for analyzing your own content. Being pricey as it is, may make it infeasible for a business on a smaller budget, as this means you'll also need to invest in content analysis and/or SEO tools for your own website.

BuzzSumo Plans & Pricing

With the chance to try it for free for 30 days, BuzzSumo is fairly confident that you'll love what you see, but that doesn't mean the platform can fit your budget. BuzzSumo is on the pricey end of things, although they have the functionality to back it. If you choose to subscribe to an annual plan, you'll save 20% off the prices listed below.

Free

BuzzSumo does offer a free plan, but you're limited to ten searches each month, one user, a year of data, one content project (with a maximum of 100 items), one custom feed, and no alerts or exports. You can also use the Content Analysis Reports, Domain Reports, Influencer Searches, Backlinks, and Journalist Profiles.

Pro

For $99/month, you'll get unlimited monthly searches, a year of data, five users, five alerts, 50 exports, unlimited projects with unlimited items, and up to 10 custom feeds. Plus, you'll get the same add-ons as the free plan.

Plus

For $179/month, you'll get unlimited monthly searches, a year of data, 10 users, 10 alerts, 150 exports, unlimited projects with unlimited items, and up to 20 custom feeds. You'll get the same add-ons as the free and pro plans, plus the Question Analyzer.

Large

For $299/month, you'll get unlimited monthly searches, two years of data, 15 users, 30 alerts, 200 exports, unlimited projects with unlimited items, and up to 50 custom feeds. In addition to the previous plan's add-ons, you'll also get the YouTube Analyzer, Top Author Search, Facebook Page Analyzer, and Facebook Pages.

Enterprise

If you have custom needs, you can reach out to the BuzzSumo team to discuss the Enterprise plan, which will be personalized to fit your business. The Enterprise plan unlocks five years of data and gives all the same great features as the Large plan, but with higher capacity.

Customer Reviews

"I love it! BuzzSumo analyzes billions of pieces of content so that everyone can access comprehensive big data analytics. Buzzsumo is a search engine that tries to show the most successful content on the web. It is based on the content that has had the most viral, and you know it by the number of times it has been shared on different social networks. Thus, with this tool, you can find the most relevant content based on specific keywords, and you will have a reference to create your own posts or blog articles with more guarantees of success. BuzzSumo helps me create real engagement with whomever I want to communicate with. It proved extremely important for me to grow my social networks." via TrustRadius

"BuzzSumo is our go-to platform for influencer marketing. You can find influencers on various social media platforms and then reach out to them. We have used this tool to find influencers and then to connect with them and develop relationships to work with us and represent our clients as well. I would definitely recommend this tool for the influencer portion to any business that wants to find and work with influencers in a specific niche. It saves you a lot of time by being able to see all the influencers in a niche." via TrustRadius

Power Your Content Marketing

Have you recognized the need for more detailed and proactive content planning? A tool like BuzzSumo can certainly help you improve your marketing outcomes, but it's pricey, and it still doesn't solve an innate problem: When, where, and how you get your content. Scripted's services may be just what you need to close the gaps.

Published by Ciara Antolini on Tuesday, February 1, 2022 in Marketing Agencies, Tool Review, Tools Reviews.