Five killer content tools
Evaluating what content on your site is performing best will help you understand what to share on social media. Use these five tools to analyze your content.
Evaluating what content on your site is performing best will help you understand what to share on social media. Use these five tools to analyze your content.
Evaluating what content on your site is performing best will help you understand what to share on social media. Use these five tools to analyze your content.
When using social media to drive traffic to your website content, you need to understand how that content is performing. But evaluating content isn’t just about high traffic numbers.
If it were, Google Analytics could be your one-stop tool for all reporting and analysis needs. In addition to traffic, you also need to understand how many people are sharing content, how many links each article has, and what topics and type of content are performing best. To gain these other insights, you need different tools and technologies. Here are five great ones:
Moz Content is the newest of the bunch. Released in mid-November, Moz Content is comprised of two main tools: Content Audit and Content Search.
Content Audit crawls, inventories and analyzes all content on any URL that you submit, whether it’s your own site or that of a competitor. It shows social sharing and links for each piece of content, and allows you to categorize by site section, content type or author. Content Search is a curation and ideation tool, showing relevant topics that can be used to create original content or for sharing on your social media channels.
Moz Content is free for one Content Audit per month and ten Content Searches per day. If you need more, a subscription is $59 per month. (Disclaimer: we use Moz ourselves.)
Kapost’s free Content Auditor tool crawls any URL you submit, and analyzes engagement across various different distribution channels. You can also categorize content by type, publish date, persona, author and theme to better understand if your content is reaching and engaging the right audience.
ContentLook gives you a content score from 0 to 100, and provides more detailed scoring, analysis and tips in six main areas: blogging, traffic, social media, SEO, links and site authority. In doing so, ContentLook checks a variety of items, including Domain Age, Facebook Open Graph and Twitter Cards implementation, XML sitemap, and mobile-friendliness.
ContentLook is free for a basic score and tips. To access more detailed insights, you must sign up for its waiting list, though you can become a free Pro member if you also invite a friend to join.
Open Site Explorer (OSE), another tool from Moz, provides link, social and authority insights for individual pages. Simply enter in a URL, and OSE will scan that page and show the domain and page authority, number of inbound links and number of social media shares on Facebook, Twitter and Google+.
Every inbound link to that page is also listed, along with anchor text, spam score and page and domain authority for the linking site. With this information, you can evaluate the quantity and quality of links to your content to better understand the overall influence of that page or site.
Authority and link metrics are free. If you’d like to see social sharing numbers and the full list of all inbound links, you must sign up for MozPro, which starts at $99 per month.
With BuzzSumo, you can enter a domain or topic to determine what content works best for driving awareness and generating engagement. For each URL entered, BuzzSumo shows social sharing numbers for Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest.
You can filter by content type, date, language and country, and include or exclude certain URLs. With a subscription starting at $99 per month, you can also view a list of all inbound links and see who has shared that content.
Intentional content and social media marketing is based on data. These five free and low-cost tools will help you understand what topics and formats your audience finds most valuable and compelling, and help make your content and social media marketing efforts more effective.