BuzzSumo can be used to monitor the recurrence of alphanumeric strings, such as digital collection or digital object names, for which the practitioner creates alerts; backlinks to a digital library website; and links to digital library domain names. BuzzSumo also creates reports that can help the practitioners assess the impact of their own social media campaigns on reuse, as well as to collect demographic information about who is using and reusing the digital collections and objects. This allows practitioners to see when others are mentioning or embedding their digital collections and digital objects.
BuzzSumo’s backlink analysis tool can help users improve their search engine optimization (SEO, or how well their website ranks in search results). According to BuzzSumo’s documentation, the tools can be used to find websites that link to your digital library content, report on the content with the most links and social engagement, and monitor links from social media and search engines. By understanding which sites link most frequently to your repository, you can directly share new content with them to build more links, therefore improving your site’s SEO. These insights can be used for both reporting and developing future outreach strategies to promote your digital library content. Users can set alerts for backlinks to their content, as well as other kinds of “brand” related engagement.
BuzzSumo’s alerting features are flexible enough to fit most workflows, with the option to receive alerts via email, Slack, or RSS. The ability to receive alerts via RSS allows users to set up additional automation options outside of BuzzSumo, for example through services like IFTTT and Zapier. For example, social media engagement data from BuzzSumo can be plugged into IFTTT or Zapier and then fed automatically into Google Sheets for integration with other data sources, like Google Analytics.
Practitioners should follow the practices laid out in the “Ethical considerations and guidelines for the assessment of use and reuse of digital content.” The Guidelines are meant both to inform practitioners in their decision-making, and to model for users what they can expect from those who steward digital collections.
BuzzSumo searches publicly available social media data, as well as other public content from across the web. While this means that BuzzSumo complies with the privacy policies of social media companies and the European internet privacy regulation GDPR, users whose use/reuse is being indexed may be unaware of how and to what extent their data may be shared.
Louise L. (2020, October 26). How To Use BuzzSumo: 15 Things You Can Do In 30 Days. BuzzSumo.
Louise L. (2021, November 20). How BuzzSumo Alerts Compare to Google Alerts for PR Monitoring. BuzzSumo.
D-CRAFT. (2023). BuzzSumo . Digital Content Reuse Assessment Framework Toolkit (D-CRAFT) ; Council on Library & Information Resources. https://reuse.diglib.org/toolkit/buzzsumo/
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