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TIL: Collect Aggregate Social Sharing Info With BuzzSumo

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I spent much of today wading through reports.

Google Analytics; Marketo; SnapApp; BuzzSumo — there are a lot of different analytics machines in my life, and I love all of them. They don’t always play nicely, but they hold fascinating insights into “what’s working,” as vague a notion as that might be.

Reporting on my content marketing program means dipping into all of these analytics platforms and pulling out the nuggets I need to learn, make adjustments, and explain my logic to the rest of my team.

One of the things I like to look at is our overall brand reach. Big question, no? My approach to tackling big questions is to make them just a little bit smaller. Chunk them out into manageable, bite-sized morsels and get a truer truth than the guesswork involved in trying to paint the broad brushstrokes of the Big Question.

When it came to the smallification of the brand reach question, I decided to look at social shares on our external content placement. That means content we’ve had syndicated through sites like Business2Community as well as guest posts we’ve placed with folks like Marketo or Content Marketing Institute.

These sites almost always offer “social proof” share figures on each post — encouraging visitors to share based on how many of their peers did — and my first plan was to go post by post jotting down these share figures. Not super scientific, but I wasn’t sure I had an alternative to brute force.

Then I remembered: BuzzSumo.

I’ve been making great use of BuzzSumo lately to see how our posts are performing relative to our mindshare and market-share competitors, but I’d only ever used it to search by keyword or domain name so far. Turns out, you can plug an entire URL into the BuzzSumo search bar and get share figures across the 5 big social networks in the blink of an eye.

That’s a post we got up on the CMI blog in September, blowing my mind with 2.6k total social shares.

I repeated this process with all our other syndicated and guest-posted content and ended up with a happily notable quantity of shares to report up the organization. Pretty cool stuff!

Have you used BuzzSumo before? Had you come across this use case before? Share your BuzzSumo love in the comments!  

Why I don’t care about going viral

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I want to create useful content.

There are already articles on how 2013 killed the concept of virality. Everyone tried so dang hard to go viral, the internet is now broken and we are all disenchanted with headlines like “I knew I loved the Beatles, but I had no idea they would literally save my dying mother’s life– and do something even MORE incredible in the meantime”.

So I’m over it. Thanks, internet, for solidifying that as soon as an idea is completely in, it’s already on its way out.

Instead, I’m shooting for 2014 to be the year of Useful Content. I want to read and write things that help people learn new skills, build better things, and contribute something of value to the world. Yes, I’ll laugh when Conan trolls a Lyft driver again. But I’ll bookmark, favorite, star, like, +1, repin, reblog and share content that helps. Content that builds. Content that contributes.