Buzzsumo is a social-content research and monitoring tool, that collects data about articles that have been shared on social feeds. 

It’s a great way for you to find out if your own content has been viewed and shared a lot, but also you can find influencers and see what kind of content their followers like to share. It’s also useful as a way to track competitors and do analysis based on their content.

If you’re looking to understand more about where your ideal buyer persona lives online and what content they like to consume, using a tool like BuzzSumo is key. It’s available for a week’s free trial and in that week you can find out an awful lot! (Note that it’s limited to just 100 searches in that trial period though…)

Start with simple searches for interest topics and keywords related to the information you already have about your buying persona, and then see what content related to those keywords has been shared the most.

Then you can deep dive into seeing exactly who has shared that content on Twitter, as it’s open-access and then take a look at their profile by clicking on ‘View Sharers’.

You can also filter by language and domain itself as well. So, if you want to look specifically on the BBC News website on Google you can exclude those domains.

If you don’t want a business or a brand showing in the results, you can also filter that out too as Twitter will know!

You then should be able to make some interesting assumptions about the type of person doing the sharing.

Click into one of the users who has shared the post you were looking at and review their profile and posts. Maybe you can then make some assumptions about who they are…

• Do they have doesn’t have many followers,?
• Are they really engaged with lots of retweeting and responses?
• What does their profile say about them?

Hopefully, you could assume their gender, age, location and interests from their Tweets and profile. Take this information and add it to the profile you already have about your ideal buying persona and give it even more colour.

Look for clues about what they’re interested in, what they buy and what content they engage with the most because that will give you big clues about how to position your offering to people like them in your own online marketing strategies.

Try and limit the number of users you take a look at as it’s easy to get drawn in and lose a few hours to doing this!

Once you have finished with the free trial of BuzzSumo, you can still access it to see what articles are the most shared for searched keywords and this could give you a better direction for what content to create for your own audience.

Should you ever need to refresh the buyer persona for any reason, you can then head to Twitter and do searches for the type of questions you think your ideal buying persona would ask and review the profiles of the people asking the question as an alternative to BuzzSumo:

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I hope this has been useful in helping you understand more about your ideal buying persona that little bit better! Be sure to use your time with BuzzSumo carefully and try to note as much about your chosen industry as possible.

If you want to find out more about how you can leverage tools like this for your own marketing research, be sure to sign up to my mailing list below: