This is a chapter from #PRstack: AI tools for marketing, media, and public relations, the latest #FuturePRoof publication. You can buy a copy of the complete book from Amazon in Kindle and print formats. The Kindle version doesn’t include images due to format limitations.
BuzzSumo by Louise Linehan | Developer
BuzzSumo is trusted by thousands of public relations practitioners, journalists, and marketers across the globe. With the world's largest database of web content and social engagement data, it supports users in analysing trends, reporting on performance, and executing an AI-assisted media strategy.
Where it fits within the public relations workflow
From creating campaign ideas to monitoring media coverage, BuzzSumo helps digital practitioners navigate every stage of their public relations strategy.
At the time of writing, it uses AI to identify 700,000+ journalists online across publications and social media.
The result is a media database that enables public relations practitioners to tackle some of the biggest problems they face, day-in-day-out:
• Discovering relevant and niche journalists – BuzzSumo combines AI with human-led verification, to discover real journalists writing across thousands of beats and publications.
• Keeping up with personnel changes across publications, and finding active journalists with open inboxes – journalists move around, and editorial teams are leaner than they have been in years. BuzzSumo uses machine learning and AI to push through 300K+ updates to journalist profiles, to arm practitioners with fresh and accurate information on who is writing, what they’re writing about, how often they’re writing, their most popular articles, and where they’re publishing right now.
• Developing ongoing relationships that work for both public relations practitioners and journalists – by linking content and engagement data to AI-discovered journalists, BuzzSumo helps practitioners to: pinpoint the most engaging topics that will drive strong coverage, discover the most engaging journalists to push their story forward, and even help journalists hit their own KPIs. The result is a symbiotic relationship, and ongoing coverage.
AI-discovered journalists
BuzzSumo’s AI powered Media Database helps practitioners track down a journalist’s contact information, but also gives them visibility over their content archives and engagement over the years.
With this information they can do powerful things; from hyper-personalising outreach, to selectively pitching only the most engaging reporters and publications.
The database also enables users to discover journalists by name, topics, verticals, media outlets, and filter searches by publication date to connect with reporters actively creating relevant content.
Once users identify promising journalists, they can analyse their beat, publication domain authority, content reactions, and engagement metrics.
BuzzSumo enables practitioners to bank their AI-discovered journalists to custom media lists for simplified outreach. In this part of the platform they can also:
• Analyse the content of journalists in their list (including engagement, publishing patterns, engagement trends, typical word counts, top content formats/types, average links, evergreen scores, etc.) by hitting an “Open in Content Analyzer” button
• Set up content alerts for specific journalists
• Export their media lists for further analysis
• Pitch their media list
AI-assisted pitching
BuzzSumo also uses generative AI to support digital practitioners in their outreach.
BuzzSumo AI Pitches drafts emails in seconds, so that they can save time drafting copy and dedicate more time to personalisation.
After entering a short prompt describing their campaign’s key information and takeaways, practitioners are met with a fully formed pitch generated by AI. They can hit “Regenerate Pitch” for new copy options, and customise until they’ve crafted their perfect pitch.
AI pitches can be formatted for readability, including bullet points and headings, and practitioners can paste URLs over existing copy to incorporate hyperlinks. They can also adjust the tone of a pitch to better reflect their own style of pitching – whether that be friendly or urgent.
But AI can only go so far – and there’s plenty of space for practitioners to add that personal touch. BuzzSumo provides fully populated journalist cards to the left of each pitch, to help practitioners quickly and easily hyper-personalise their emails to the individual journalist.
These cards showcase the journalist's latest impactful coverage, social media presence, biographical details, and more – just when practitioners need it most. Reviewing a journalist's own content helps practitioners craft subject lines that spark instant recognition and response.
They can simply review the information on the left and input their personalisation on the right.
Once they’re happy with their pitches, BuzzSumo enables users to send and report on their outreach performance in-app, including opens, forwards, and response rates.
And finally, to analyse the impact of their AI-driven outreach efforts, the platform enables practitioners to monitor backlinks to their campaign pages, and discover relevant brand mentions in BuzzSumo Monitoring & Alerts:
Use case
Agency based practitioners are often tasked, by clients, to win coverage in a specific publication.
Using BuzzSumo’s AI augmented toolset, they can not only discover journalists writing for said publications, but also research and analyse the most engaging content on that platform.
In doing so, they can personalise their campaigns to specific publications and journalists from the outset, so that their pitch is guaranteed to appeal.
From a list of relevant journalists writing for the desired publication, they can single out and give pitch-priority to the ones that drive the most links, engagement, and authority.
Then, they can analyse the publication and/or journalist’s winning content formats and headline types, understand the emotions they tend to stir up in their audiences, and even track trends in their publishing cadence to get an idea of coverage turnaround.
BuzzSumo’s AI toolset doesn’t just enable practitioners to seamlessly find and contact journalists, it helps them lay the groundwork for far-reaching coverage.
Louise Linehan, senior content manager, BuzzSumo
https://www.linkedin.com/in/louise-linehan-898229102/
Louise is senior content manager at BuzzSumo, and has worked for hyper-growth startups in the B2B SaaS industry for the last eight years. She oversees BuzzSumo’s content and public relations, and is invested in helping practitioners get the absolute most out of their strategies.