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Updated October 3rd 2023
15 Things You Can Do With BuzzSumo’s Content Ideas Generator
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Contents
What is the BuzzSumo Content Ideas Generator?
What are the benefits of using the Content Ideas Generator?
Who should use the Content Ideas Generator?
How can you use the BuzzSumo Content Ideas Generator for free?
15 things you can do with the Content Ideas Generator
- Deconstruct the most engaging headlines
- Get ideas from evergreen content
- Turn TL;DR SEO subheadings into tips to share on social media
- Curate trending content for your social channels
- Unearth new communities
- Find audience topics and questions to answer in your content
- Build a content brief for yourself or a freelancer
- Choose the most engaging content formats
- Get a gauge on how detailed your content should be
- Find UGC brand content to share on your social media channels
- Find examples for compilation content
- Decide which platform to promote on for top engagement
- Forecast your social media engagement
- Publish on the most engaging days of the week
- Repurpose content for the most engaging social channels
What is the BuzzSumo Content Ideas Generator?
Just in case genius ideas don’t come to you in your sleep… or in the bath… or on a walk, or wherever else you may have been told to find them, we’ve built the Content Ideas Generator.
Not to be confused with Content Analyzer (BuzzSumo's in-depth content research tool) the Content Ideas Generator brings together billions of:
- Headlines
- Subheadings
- Keywords
- SERP results
- Questions
- Topics
- And other handy content engagement data…
… from across BuzzSumo, to help you come up with endless ideas for researching, creating, and distributing your next piece of kickass content.
What are the benefits of using the Content Ideas Generator?
It’s quick
The Content Ideas Generator gives you the ability to outline a strategy in a matter of minutes, so you can spend less time deliberating, and more time perfecting ✨
It’s easy
The Content Ideas Generator is SUPER easy to use – just search a simple keyword and get back a ton of useful insights.
It’s timeless
Looking for trending ideas? Or maybe evergreen topics? The Content Ideas Generator gives you both – and everything in between. With data ranging from 24 hours to five years, you can tap into viral trends or timeless classics.
It teaches you the RIGHT way to “do” content
Its ease-of-use means the Ideas Generator is the perfect place to kickstart your content journey if you’re new to the platform – or even to content marketing!
The research, create, and distribute workflow will walk you through you the steps you need to take to ensure your content hits the mark every time 🎯 💪
It’s a one-stop-shop for content ideas
If you're already a BuzzSumo fan, then the Content Ideas Generator helps you consolidate your favorite Discover tools and Content Analyzer insights, into one easy workflow.
It gives you snappy insights, and helps you decide whether to dive deeper into the rest of the platform for more granular analysis.
Who should use the Content Ideas Generator?
If you’re a content marketer, the Content Ideas Generator is perfect for you. You can use it for blog ideas, headline tips, format and content type inspiration, and so much more.
But it also offers awesome insights for a bunch of other teams and roles including:
- PRs
- Brand / Product marketers
- Customer marketers
- Customer success managers
- SEO or PPC managers
- Social media marketers
How can you use the BuzzSumo Content Ideas Generator for free?
The Content Ideas Generator is available on the all BuzzSumo plans, but if you’re not a BuzzSumo user yet, you can get 5 free searches right here, right now…
Or, if you’re already hooked, get 30-days or 100 free searches via our free trial.
15 things you can do with the Content Ideas Generator
Research
1. Deconstruct the most engaging headlines
Headlines are super important. If they’re good enough, your audience will share them ahead of even reading the article. Think of them as an 11 word, 65 character elevator pitch for your content (that’s the optimum length of an engaging headline, according to our own research on 100m of them.)
Something so important requires careful consideration. The Content Ideas Generator is great for this, since it serves you only the most engaging headlines for your search. All that’s left for you to do is dissect them.
In this example, top “Email marketing” headlines consist of “What you need to know”, “How to’s”, and the impact of Apple news on marketers.
These insights will help you create a top-notch email marketing headline of your own.
Pro Tip
Get B2B content ideas
Don’t miss the B2B filters throughout the Content Ideas Generator, if you’re looking for more niche B2B content ideas!
2. Get ideas from evergreen content
If you’re looking to create content that stands the test of time, take tips from the top evergreen headlines.
At BuzzSumo, we have developed a proprietary Evergreen Score which shows how successful a piece of content has been at acquiring both shares AND links over time.
The Content Ideas Generator lets you quickly sort by evergreen content, so that you can understand which topics drive ongoing interest.
3. Turn TL;DR SEO subheadings into tips to share on social media
You’ll find a treasure trove of actionable advice in the subheadings of top ranking content.
Why not search for “tips”, “steps”, or “checklist” based headlines in the Content Ideas Generator, and curate the top SEO subheadings in your social media posts?
We did just this for the keyword “Blog checklist”...
4. Curate trending content for your social channels
Set the date range filter in the Content Ideas Generator to trending, and find viral content ideas to discuss and share on your social channels.
Pro Tip
Keep your trend searches broad
This will help you find stories that have gained the most traction.
5. Unearth new communities
When you search your keyword in the Content Ideas Generator, you’re also searching Wikipedia, Quora, and Reddit for related information.
This helps you instantly tap into hot discussion topics, and – most importantly – new communities.
In the example above, we’ve found a bunch of new recipe channels and communities to mine for new topic ideas. Or, we can even join in on audience conversation.
Pro Tip
Tap into conversations happening around your brand
Search your brand name in the Content Ideas Generator, and to find your audience’s questions on communities such as Quora and Reddit.
Then simply click through to respond to them with relevant info and useful resources.
You can take this one step further and repeat the process – but for your competitors.
This will give you the opportunity to tap into their audience, and respond to any unanswered questions.
6. Find audience topics and questions to answer in your content
Explore the topic generator and question ideas to:
- Enhance the relevancy of your content
- Rank for a breadth of high and low-volume keywords
- Satisfy audience intent
These two features provide a goldmine of top-of-the-funnel ideas and audience problems.
And to find middle or bottom-of-the-funnel question ideas, you just need to configure your search accordingly.
For example, try searching your brand or product to find bottom-of-the-funnel customer questions:
Or add work high-intent keywords like “Cost” or “Price” into your search:
Then try answering these questions to create bottom-of-the-funnel content that converts.
7. Build a content brief for yourself or a freelancer
The Content Ideas Generator is a great starting point for building a content brief.
Just search your topic, and get a bunch of information you’d expect in a content brief, including:
- Keyword ideas and metrics to include
- Top content examples
- External link opportunities (in the form of top headlines)
- Topic suggestions
- Structure ideas from top SEO content
- Questions to answerWord count guidelines
- Content type & format advice
Then simply add in extra details on your focus keyword, audience, tone of voice, internal links, and so on. Or, even more simply, use BuzzSumo’s Brief Generator to gather all these insights from a Content Ideas Generator search, at the click of a button, and generate the perfect content brief. These generated briefs can be copied, pasted in your chosen doc, edited, and distributed easily.
Create
8. Choose the most engaging content formats
Know what format your content should take, by honing in on the most engaging content types for your topic.
For extra detail, simply click on the chart to get examples of the most shared headlines behind each content type.
Get endless content ideas, podcast ideas, webinar ideas, newsletter ideas – and more!
9. Get a gauge on how detailed your content should be
Create content that engages audiences for exactly the right amount of time.
The Content Ideas Generator pulls in data from the Content Analysis tab report to show the optimum length your content should be, to result in high shares.
In the example below, “Glamping” content gets the most engagement at the 2 - 3K word mark.
Combining this insight with the content types report gives us some extra bit of intel.
Podcasts are the most engaging format here, so we’d be wise to create a podcast and accompanying 2.5K word transcript, to appeal to our glamping audience.
In fact, we can even find out roughly how long our podcast should be with content length data.
According to wordstotime.com, 2,500 words is the equivalent to 15 - 20 minutes worth of audio, so that’s how long our podcast needs to be!
Pretty nifty 😉
10. Find UGC brand content to share on your social media channels
Search your brand or products and checkout the content types report, to tap into all the different forms and varieties of User Generated Content.
See who has been writing the most engaging headlines around your brand, and curate positive news to share on social.
And, for in-depth insights into how customers use your products or services, click on the “Reviews” bar chart.
Then use these positive reviews, testimonials, and use cases in your marketing – and make sure to share any juicy insights with teams across the business, including Customer Success, Product, and Sales.
11. Find examples for compilation content
Curating content is a great way to help your customers find useful resources.
Use the content types report to hone in on the most engaging and helpful podcasts, newsletters, videos, blogs, infographics, or tutorials, to compile and share with your audience.
Organizing helpful content will mean you're viewed as a helpful resource, by association.
Distribute
12. Decide which platform to promote on for top engagement
The Content Ideas Generator helps you identify the channel gaining the most engagement for your specific topic.
You can use this data in your social media planning, or even let it inform your content creation.
For instance, in the example below we’re analyzing the topic of “Blog checklists”.
Facebook is the most engaging platform for this type of content, but hot on its heels is Pinterest.
As a result, we’d want to make sure we were creating visual "Blog checklist" content, to make the most of Pinterest engagement.
13. Forecast your social media engagement
If you know the average engagement of a topic, you can predict how much interest you stand to drive on social media if you create content around it.
Luckily the Content Ideas Generator gives you that data.
If you know your social media CTR, you can then use this data to work backwards and calculate KPIs for boosting social traffic.
14. Publish on the most engaging days of the week
Use the Content Ideas Generator to meet your audience on the days they’ll be most receptive to your content.
In the instance of “Blog checklists”, we’re all more tuned into perfecting our content on a Monday.
15. Repurpose content for the most engaging social channels
Once you know which headlines are driving the most engagement, why not borrow some of that wisdom? 😉
Upcycle the most salient points from top content, and let channel engagement inform how you repurpose that content.
In the example below we’ve searched “NFTs”. The most engaging headline is a need-to-know guide, and one of the top platforms for engagement is Twitter – earning an average of 21 shares per post.
With this knowledge, we might choose to plan-in a TL;DR Twitter thread with a definition of NFTs, and a summary of the top points featured in the article.
Final thoughts
If you’re serious about content marketing, use the Content Ideas Generator. It gives you endless ideas, and is far more interesting to look at than a blank page 😉
Did I miss any cool use cases? Let me know on LinkedIn.
Remember, you can test-drive the Content Ideas Generator free for 30-days with a free trial.
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