Going Beyond Shareable Content with BuzzSumo's SteveRayson

Today we're happy to share our interview with BuzzSumo's SteveRayson. As BuzzSumo is a relatively new company, we asked Steve to talk a bit about its foundingbefore answering the seven specific questions we had for him. You'll want to be sure to read hisintriguing take on the future of social sharing. Enjoy!

When was BuzzSumo founded?

The first version of the free product was created in 2013 by James Blackwell and Henley Wing. Thistool allowed people to search for the most shared content published over the past 6 months.

At the time they were employed and developing the product in their spare time. I was so impressedby the tool that I approached James and Henley about developing a paid product, creating acompany and working on the product full-time.

We first met face to face in December 2013, where I agreed to invest to allow James and Henley towork full-time on developing BuzzSumo Pro as a paid product.

We established BuzzSumo as a company in March 2014, with the three of us as directors. The firstpaid product, BuzzSumo Pro, was launched in September 2014. The paid version includes contentalerts, reports and influencer analysis. We have continued to add to the product, including our latesttrending features.

What was the inspiration for its creation?

In essence it was about searching for content that was resonating with people. Google is great, but itis based on authority sites. Thus if you search for, say, e-learning, it will start with Wikipedia. Wewere interested in the content that was resonating, e.g., what was the most shared contentduring this week or that month.

We were also interested in how content gets amplified, meaning who shares and links to the contentand why? Our tool will show who shared an article and who linked to it so you can understand how itis being amplified. I think promotion is a much neglected area -- people should spend as much or

more time on promoting content as researching and creating it.

We are a small team so we tend to cover lots of bases. I tend to focus on marketing and strategicdevelopment, and relationships with partners. We have recently done joint webinars with Cana,Hubspot, Uberflip and Wordstream. On any given day I can be doing anything from researching newfeature ideas and talking to customers about what would be helpful to them, to writing articles andanswering support queries.

Any milestones in BuzzSumo's growth that you'd like to share?

We recently passed 100,000 subscribers to our free product and more importantly 1,000 payingcustomers.

The key to any successful SaaS (software as a service) product is minimizing churn, which is theturnover of paying customers. Thus you want to make sure you have a product that provides valueand that people use as part of their daily work.

You need to track things like active daily users and your ongoing churn rate, as well as your monthlygrowth in revenues and users.

It is important to focus on customer service as you grow and help your customers to get the most outof the tool. They are also your greatest asset in that they can help you identify features that will bereally valuable to your audience.

BuzzSumo was once described as a "fusion of human intelligence and digital intelligence". Thatseems to be a good descriptor - can you talk a little about that?

I am not sure where that came from but I understand the sentiment. It is difficult to define "goodcontent" but we can define content that is resonating with audiences as we can see people share itand link to it. We can draw insights from this data.

Thus we can see that posts with images get more shares than posts without, that infographics arewell shared in some areas, that list posts get more shares than other content formats, that quizzesget well shared, etc. We can then improve our odds of producing content that resonates byunderstanding this data.

We have found that the best content formats depend a lot on the topic and the audience. It isimportant to research what works with your audience.

Tracking content trends is also important. A BuzzSumo top content search will show you the mostshared content in the last month or last 24 hours so you can see what is resonating. The BuzzSumotrending section will show you today's most shared content for any topic, providing real timeinsights into the content that is engaging your audience.

We are fundamentally about helping people create better content: content that resonates and getsshared. We hopefully do that by providing insights through data such as what is working in yourarea or for your competitors.

Many companies push out large volumes of content to "please Google." How can big data streamlinea company's content marketing efforts and gain better results?

I think you need to start with content research and produce a content plan. I think one of the mostimportant aspects of content marketing is being consistent. You need to consistently producecontent as the benefits accrue over time. You need a schedule, whatever that is -- e.g. one blog posta week -- and you need to stick to it.

Data helps you to focus on creating content that works, and getting a balance of content to supportthe various stages of the sales funnel. Here are some examples below:

What matters as much as the content itself is distribution and promotion, which we come to below.

Some experts believe that it's better to write one really good piece of content a month (that'sproperly promoted,) than multiple pieces of content with little or no promotion strategy. Have youseen data that supports this?

All content should be "good" and it can be better to produce one really good, well-researched articlethan four poor pieces of content. The key is that you are producing something of value to youraudience. If you have limited resources you need to be realistic about what you can produce.

Sites like the Harvard Business Review produce good content but it doesn't mean they only publishone blog post a week. In fact they average 50 blog posts a week. They do this through guest authors.Guest authors and curation are one way you can seek to increase the volume of content.

The key is that you promote your content. It doesn't matter how good your content is, people willsimply not find it if you don't promote it. My view is that you need to spend as much time, if notmore, promoting and amplifying content as creating it.

You need to think about this before you write your post. For example, can you involve influencers inthe research or interview them? Be clear how you are going to promote the post - which socialchannels, how many people will share it for you, which forums are you going to submit your contentto, what paid promotion you will use, etc.

From your research, how does the underlying emotion of a blog post impact its shareability? Whatcan this mean for, say, B2B content that's typically considered "boring?" Is there an opportunitythere?

Emotion can help improve shareability. Last year we analyzed the top 10,000 most shared articlesacross the web, and mapped each one to an emotion, such as joy, sadness, anger, amusement,laughter, etc. Here is how the breakdown of how the emotions looked:

However, I don't think you need to focus on emotion to get good shareability. In B2B, people aretime pressed and want to do their job better and faster. Thus if you can produce content that ishelpful, people will value it and share it.

So you can identify the key questions people are asking and produce good answers. The aim really isto be the best answer to the question. The top ten thousand "how to" posts this year were sharedmore than 19,000 times on average.

You can also experiment with list posts and picture lists. List posts provide a promise, such as "5steps to improve your landing page".

Posts that are well structured and skimmable also do well. Below is a good example. This post hasclear numbered steps, links to further resources, good use of images to explain points, and top tipsto make the post actionable.

Images work well because we process images much faster than text and they help us to skim articlesfaster. They also work well if you are taking someone through a process, telling a story or makingcomparisons. One post format I think will continue to do well is a picture list post, i.e., a curatedseries of images.

You conducted an interesting interview with SEMrush where you outlined how BuzzSumo andSEMrush go hand-in-hand for competitive intelligence efforts. Are there other tools you'drecommend for writers?

I use tools like BuzzSumo and Feedly to keep on top of new content and to generate content ideas.

On BuzzSumo, I use top content searches to find new content ideas, but what works better for mepersonally is setting up content alerts and custom trending feeds. I then turn each of these into RSSfeeds that I pull into Feedly. I then get a constant stream of posts on specific topics such as datadriven marketing.

For trending content, I will also use Hashtagify to see related trending hashtags.

Many smaller companies are direct competitors of large brands with big followings. What are somecompetitive intelligence steps their writers could take that could build authority faster and increasetheir content's shareability?

There has never been a better time for small companies. They can move faster than larger brandsand can achieve reach through web publishing combined with promotion and influencer marketing.They can really punch way above their weight.

Smaller companies can also jump on trends much faster and engage in relevant discussions.

They can build a personal voice, as well. I feel social is very much about people. I rarely followsomeone unless they have a face; I don't like to follow logos. When you think about whose articlesyou want to read on the web it is normally a person not a corporation.

If you peer into your crystal ball...where do you think social sharing is headed?

I think it is interesting that more people discover content now via social than via search. Socialovertook search for the first time last year -- in fact the volume of Google searches fell last year forthe first time. A recent research project published by the American Press Institute found that youngpeople get most of their news from social channels.

Social media's role as a content discovery platform is only just beginning. I think people will becomemore sophisticated in how they build personal learning networks using social media and how theymine social data for trends.

You can connect with Steve Rayson via Twitter and LinkedIn

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