- Deciding what topics to focus on
and finding who influences opinion
on those topics can be difficult.
There are many tools
out there both free and paid.
Let's just focus on one - BuzzSumo.
BuzzSumo has a free trial
and is easy to use,
but there are many alternatives.
Once you understand what you're looking for
it's just a case
of comparing which tool has the best data
and user experience for you.
So the most important thing that I look at
in BuzzSumo is popular content by topic.
So you can get there two ways;
one is good to this middle section here
and click on web,
or the second is to go to the navigation
and then content and then web here.
So we're going to search
for a topic you would search
for whatever topic you're interested
in writing about but for me,
choose cryptocurrency.
(keyboard typing)
Now, what we're seeing here is a ranks list
of all of the articles on cryptocurrency
and they're ranked by total engagement.
You can see that this article here
has 1.3 million total engagements.
The vast majority of which came
from Facebook.
You can hover
over each individual's social network kind
of see a bit more information about them.
So for example, 61% the reactions were angry
to the story.
If you care about one session
that worked more than another,
you can actually rank them
by that individual social network.
So for example,
if you wanted to get ranking on Reddit,
that was the social network
that you were most interested in,
you could click on Reddit here
and it's going to filter everything
and sorts it by Reddit.
There are also filters at the top.
For example, you can filter
by what type of content it was,
or you can exclude certain websites.
You can choose the word count,
publisher size or even filter by reaction.
What I recommend is to go
through each one of these articles individually
because not all of them will be interesting
for your business for you to write about.
So for example, Tesla buying 1.5 billion
in Bitcoin might be really interesting
if you are writing about Bitcoin,
but something that is talking
about the Brave browser hijacking links
is not actually relevant to the topic at hand.
One of the really cool thing that BuzzSumo does is,
it actually gives you an analysis
of the content types that are ranking.
So if we click on view analysis
then we can see how many articles were analyzed,
what the total engagement was,
and therefore the average engagements.
So we can scroll down
and see engagement over time
as well as engagement by network.
But what I find the most useful is the engagement
by content types.
We can see that videos aren't getting
that much engagement compared
to the average for this topic.
Whereas how do articles are doing a little bit better,
what posts are doing better than that,
and then lists on why posts are doing the best.
One more thing I want to show you here
which is the top sharers.
So if you go back to view content
and you find an article you want to talk about,
this one Tesla buys 1.5 billion in Bitcoin.
Then let's go here to view top shares.
What this is building is a list
of the different people who actually shared this
and then giving you a bit more information
about that person.
Number one sharer here,
the most important influencer,
is Scott Adams
and he gets on average 265 retweets for every tweet.
His reply ratio is 46% which is very high
and he has 614,000 Twitter followers.
So you can go through
and then save these
to a project or just note them down.
And these are people to potentially follow
or engage with if you want your articles shared as well.
The final thing I'm going to look
at is trending topics.
This is quite useful to catch new articles
because I know they might not have very many shares yet
and therefore it won't show up at the top of this list.
So you can either go back to home
and then go into trending here
or you can go to discover
and trending in the navigation.
And what you have
here is a few curated lists for example,
if you wanted to know what's trending
for coronavirus,
you could look here
or just general news
or sports
or tech that can be useful.
But actually what I recommend is,
you create your own custom list
for your topic.
So if you click on curate list
and then let's call this cryptocurrency, (keyboard typing)
and then we're just going
to add the topics that we're interested in.
So crypto currency
and then you can also filter out specific keywords.
So in this case,
I'm going to filter out criminal
because I'm never going
to write about criminal activity with cryptocurrency,
it just doesn't fit my brand.
And maybe the name of a terrorist groups that might show up
because they also use cryptocurrency in some cases.
Now, none of those articles are going to show up
and I can also filter out different domains
or filter for specific countries.
In this case,
I recommend filtering for the United States
or wherever your audience is
because otherwise you do get some kind
of unusual articles ranking from
from other countries that you might not be interested in
and this just saves you a little bit of time.
I'm going to click Create Feed
and there you go Feed Cryptocurrency has been created
and we have the different articles here.
You can see that they don't have that much engagement yet,
some of them do,
but you can see the trending score.
So this is a ranking
of how quickly they're going
to start gathering engagement.
You can also see which social networks
are getting the engagement on,
which is quite useful.
Now, of course BuzzSumo has plenty more features
that you could dive into
and all of the competitors
to BuzzSumo have really interesting,
unique features.
They all have different data sources
or different connectors
to the APIs and they display the data
in different ways.
This is an endless job to kind of dig into it
but hopefully you understand a little bit
of the basics of how this type of tool can be used.
The main thing we're looking for to take away is,
what are the topics that are interesting to write about
and then who sharing those topics.
And if you can get to that
then the tool is going to be useful for you.
Now, you know how to do topic
and influencer research using BuzzSumo.
You should be able to transfer this skill to
whatever tool you decide to use in the future.