There are so many tools out there that are designed to make PR work a little easier, but which are actually any good? This week Katy Bloomfield, comms director at agency at TopLine Comms reviews the tool BuzzSumo

Tool name and maker: BuzzSumo

Competitive set:  Traackr and Meltwater

What this tool does: BuzzSumo analyses the internet’s best performing content, authors and topics. It allows you to search a subject, and find the content that has been most shared on social media, as well as the influencers and experts that are writing about it. It then presents the results segmented by content shares, across multiple channels.

Price as reviewed: $299 per month

The test: Compiling an influencer list.

What we asked this tool to do: We recently used BuzzSumo to compile a list of London’s most influential cryptocurrency journalists: tracking whose content had been most widely shared, and who was sharing the most on the subject.

How it performed: BuzzSumo is really simple – and quick to use, and it goes the extra mile on its competitors by analysing content shared, which is brilliant for influencer outreach, but also content research more broadly.

It produced the authors list in a matter of seconds and allowed us to further narrow the selection down by country, date, language, word count, content type and author type, for precise results.

We really liked that the tool provided us with the option to define the type of influencer we were looking for by filtering. In this case, we needed to identify journalists only, so we just used this filter. However there are several options, including broadcaster and companies, that would be useful for working on a specific media brief.

BuzzSumo also provides two options when it comes to finding influencers: search by bio, or search content shared. Both of these options are very useful, as it allowed us to find both specialist crypto writers, and topical, news journalists that had recently covered the topic. The list we created in the end was a mix of both.

The results are presented in a visual format that’s very easy to review and you can rank the results by many different criteria – including follower number. Another handy feature is that the social footprint of each influencer is included in the results presentation. It even shows their retweet and reply ratio – giving a good indication of their engagement.

By clicking on ‘view links shared’ within the search result for an individual influencer, and then analyse links, the tool will display which sources the influencer has most shared news from – very handy to inform homework to do ahead of a briefing.

Finally, there are links to all of the content shared, in one place – making it super simple to find the relevant stories.

Likes:

• Speed
• Simplicity
• Presentation
• Detailed filtering
• Ranking options
• Source analysis

Dislikes: We really love using BuzzSumo, but perhaps one product enhancement would be to introduce a keyword analysis, to show the words that are most frequently used in content on a selected topic. Secondly, having the social media handles of the influencers is great, but it BuzzSumo could also provide an email and phone number, that would be amazing!

Star rating (out of 5):

Written by Katy Bloomfield, comms director at agency TopLine Comms