BuzzSumo is perfect for larger companies, but make sure it works for you if you're a small business or B2B!
December 20, 2018

BuzzSumo is perfect for larger companies, but make sure it works for you if you're a small business or B2B!

Brittney Collier | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Buzzsumo

We use BuzzSumo to gain insight on how prospective clients find our content, how we can lead them to our content using SEO, and when it's best to publish content. The platform also provides information to help us determine which social media platforms are more receptive or responsive to certain topics and content types.
  • The best part about BuzzSumo is its insight on SEO/keywords. The platform lets you know which keywords relevant to our products have been searched most frequently. By figuring out how prospects are searching for content like ours, we're able to improve the language we use to target them.
  • BuzzSumo really helps with finding the most effective content publishing times. For example, we're a B2B company, so we thought that posting on social media throughout the week was most effective since our customers would be in the office. However, the tools on BuzzSumo showed us that engagement with similar content was heaviest on Sunday nights over the last year.
  • BuzzSumo has a great tool for understanding which social media platform to use for sharing your content. After finding the most relevant keywords for your audience and content type, the platform has graphs showing you which social media sites these types of content were viewed on the most. This helped us to stop posting on social media platforms that our prospects weren't using.
  • The worst aspect of BuzzSumo is the pricing. We're a non-profit and we pay $299/month to use the platform. The lowest price you can get the platform for is $99/month and you'll have the least features. I think this is way too expensive -- especially for the enterprise package which is $499 or more/month. To be fair, I think the pricing for non-profits, schools/students, and small businesses should be discounted.
  • I wish BuzzSumo provided more keyword recommendations. Before I researched heavily enough to find out what our prospects typically searched for when looking for products similar to ours, I didn't know where to begin. Because of that, my keyword searches didn't bring up many results in the beginning, and BuzzSumo doesn't give recommendations when that happens. I eventually had to go on Google to be led in the right direction, which partially defeats the purpose of having BuzzSumo.
  • BuzzSumo has helped us generate revenue by bringing more traffic/legitimate customers to our web content. By teaching us which keywords our prospects are searching for, we are able to create content that attracts them and answers the questions they have once they start looking for products like ours.
  • BuzzSumo has helped us lower wasted labor. We initially thought that prospects were most active on Twitter and LinkedIn since there are a lot of users focusing on business there. However, BuzzSumo revealed that the majority of content similar to ours was viewed on Facebook. This enabled us to stop wasting labor with constant posting on irrelevant and ineffective social media platforms.
I selected BuzzSumo because it had a few insights that Google Trends didn't. However, because Google Trends is free, I would recommend it to anyone who wants similar features, but can't afford to pay the price for BuzzSumo.
I think that BuzzSumo is perfect for large B2C companies. However, B2B and small businesses may have trouble getting their money's worth. For example, BuzzSumo's SEO features and the social media insights don't always apply during the buyer journey for B2B businesses because we often present our content to clients directly -- especially for larger companies. It wouldn't make sense to create content that attracts online visitors if you plan to present the content during a video or in-person meeting. Lastly, the pricing could make it difficult for small businesses, non-profits, etc. to use the platform.