At Delightful, we believe content marketing and influencer marketing can’t live without each other.
Content can be seen as the currency of most influencer marketing activities and, on the other hand, influencers help amplify content and bring brands the credibility to reach and engage with relevant audience.
However, it’s not easy to find the right influencers to help you create killer content and amplify it. Most influencer marketing tools that can help marketers find influencers evaluate how influential they are based on their social media performance, while the influencers content marketers value the most, are those who write and share not just on social media, but also on their blog and 3rd party publications.
Buzzsumo is the perfect tool to solve this problem for content marketers. By providing powerful content insight, the tool can help marketers find the right influencers to boost their content creation and amplification numbers.
We picked up a bunch of knowledge from a recent webinar with Steve Rayson, Director at Buzzsumo: Here are 4 ways to use BuzzSumo to find the perfect influencers for your content marketing program:
Find out who is writing well on your topic
Buzzsumo’s advanced social search engine helps you find the most shared content on a topic, author or domain. Since it’s hard for marketers to get metrics such as page views or numbers of visitors of content published on 3rd party publications, social media share numbers has become an important indicator in evaluating a piece of content’s impact and how it has resonated with an audience.
By typing in a relevant topic, Buzzsumo will be able to list out the top shared content within seconds. Instead of focusing on the content itself, you can also take a deep look into the authors’ information. By clicking on the author’s name, you can check what other articles s/he has written, what topics s/he’s interested in, any other publications s/he’s writing for, so you can further decide if s/he is the right influencer for your program.
Also, to make sure the influencer is still active, you can specify the timeframe to past month or past 6 months, based on your needs.
A more direct way to find influencers who are writing about the topic you care about, is to use the Content Analysis and Top Authors tool. By typing in the topic you want to search, Buzzsumo will list out top authors based on how many times their articles have been shared.
By looking at the number of articles published and average shares, you can get a general idea on how active and how influential authors are.
What publications are interested in this topic
Understanding the interest and impact of publications greatly helps content marketers to find media-type influencers. A lot of brands see editors and journalists as their first tier influencers because they’ve already got the credibility and have a large audience base.
If there’s a target publication in mind and you would like to find who’s been writing on a relevant topic, you can set up a filter on their domains when searching for the most shared content. For example, by looking for content relevant to “personal branding” within the domain entrepreneur.com, I’ve found that they’ve published 27 articles on personal branding in the last 6 months, and I’ve also got an idea of who are the top authors for these posts.
Moreover, you can use the Content Analysis tool to check out the average shares, popular content types, average content length, etc. to understand the impact of the publication. This information can also help you build a winning strategy when reaching out to the editors and journalists.
Find out who’s sharing your or your competitor’s content
While some influencers can help you create stellar content, some are good at amplifying them. With Buzzsumo, you are able to check who has been sharing your (or your competitor’s) content on what channel.
Click on the “View Shares” button beside the content you want to analyze; Buzzsumo will list out influencers who have shared it instantly. By looking at metrics such as domain authority, followers, and average retweets, you can quickly understand how impactful these influencers are and how engaging their audience is.
You can also use the filters to exclude the noise. For example, if you only want to look at journalists and bloggers, tick the boxes and you will get what you want!
Another great tool to find out who’s sharing the relevant content is the Audience Builder, which allows you to see who’s sharing content from a certain domain related to a topic.
What content is linking to you
We believe that backlinks are critical to marketers not only for SEO, but also for content marketing, influencer marketing, and PR. Backlinks can be very helpful in finding out who’s been referencing your content because they may not necessarily mention you or your product’s name when they are linking to your content.
For example, to find out who’s been writing about our latest personal branding eBook, just type in the URL of the book and voila, there are nine articles on eight notable websites mentioning the book including Forbes and Entrepreneur.
As authors or publications were already referencing your content, it’s more likely that they will be interested in knowing more about your brand and build a mutually benefiting relationship.
Don’t miss out on social influencers
Similar to other social media analytics tools, Buzzsumo can help you find Twitter influencers based on keyword search. However, what sets Buzzsumo apart from the other tools is that you can check the links they are sharing on social media platforms, along with all the other numbers on domain authorities, average retweets, followers, etc., so you will be able to instantly understand how active, engaging and impactful they are. You can also utilize tfilters to select among bloggers, journalists, companies, etc.
Last but not least, you can always export all this data to analyze it further in Excel if you want.
Influencer engagement is a journey. Finding the right influencers is only the first step in forging a solid influencer marketing program.
Visit our influencer marketing service page and we’ll be glad to help!
Thanks for reading,
Bianca Hu – Digital Marketing Strategist at Delightful Communications