Introducing BuzzStream Discovery: A Better Way to Find & Research Influencers

Today, we’re excited to announce BuzzStream Discovery, our new product that will make finding and researching influencers for your marketing campaigns a much smoother process. The tool is currently in open beta, and free to use immediately.

We built BuzzStream Discovery because we’ve been hearing about (and experiencing) the pain of influencer discovery and research for quite some time. Whether you’re building an outreach list, looking for influential content contributors, finding authorities to write product reviews or engaging in any other influencer marketing activities, you’re aware of the challenges that accompany this process. The current approach of running multiple searches to explore a vertical, putting together new searches that will pull back appropriate publications and content, establishing authority thresholds, researching that content to ensure it is current and relevant, then attempting to find author-specific information is incredibly tedious and time consuming. We’re hoping to change that.

Streamlined Influencer Discovery

With BuzzStream Discovery, you can begin researching influencers that write about specific topics right away. Simply enter a keyword or phrase people in your vertical care about, and we’ll return a list of some of the most relevant influencers writing about that topic.

You’ll see several pieces of information on these results that will help you decide whether an influencer will be valuable for your particular project. Each result contains the influencer’s name, Twitter handle (if we’ve discovered it), blogs and publications they write for, categories they cover, relevant articles for your search term and share information for those articles.

You can narrow down these results to match your specific criteria by using our search filters. Currently, you have the option to filter on number of Twitter followers, date of an influencer’s last post, and Domain authority. Be on the lookout for additional filters soon!

Get the complete picture

If you want more information about an influencer, head over to their profile. At a glance, we’ll show you engagement and activity levels for the influencer, broken into distinct metrics.

You can also take a deeper dive into your selected influencer’s online presence by reviewing their profile tabs. The content tab is shown by default, and will let you review all of the content and associated share data we’ve collected for an influencer.

You can search this content to get more visibility into the types of things the influencer says about your niche, and you can also filter their content by topic and by publication, and sort by recency or number of shares on a specific social channel.

The next tab is the Footprint tab. This will let you quickly understand where your influencer spends their time online, the authority of the websites he or she writes for, the number of articles written for specific publications or websites, and the average shares posts get there.

The final tab is the Network tab. This will give you insight into the relationships your selected influencer has with others in our database so you can see if you’ve got any existing contacts you can leverage for outreach, or just use an already vetted influencer as a jumping off point into their connections which might also be useful for populating your lists. We’ll show you whose content the selected influencer shares, as well as who shares content from the selected influencer.

Direct Connection with BuzzStream Outreach

If you’re a current BuzzStream customer, then you’re in for a treat. You can add influencers you research in BuzzStream Discovery right into projects in your current Outreach account. From there, we will discover an influencer’s contact information so you can build relationships according to your existing workflow.

New Features on the Horizon

For all the benefit you’ll get out of the current beta version of this product, we’re still working hard on the product. We’re adding more authors and content all the time, and continuing to refine our data so you can be confident in the results you see. We’ll also be adding numerous improvements in the near future which will continuously make it easier to find the right people for your campaigns. Some things to be on the lookout for include:

• Advanced search operators
• Location filters
• Category filters
• Improved workflow features

Expert Opinion

Need a second opinion on BuzzStream Discovery? Check out what some of the best in the industry have to say about it:

“BuzzStream Discovery is one of the most fully-featured, powerful, and fast influencer search engines I’ve ever seen. I expect many marketers will make this their go-to tool for starting the outreach process.” Rand Fishkin, Moz

“Influence marketing has been pivotal to the success of my business but it’s always been fairly time consuming to put together a list of niche influencers, despite the tools already available. I love how BuzzStream Discovery puts a huge database of influencers at my finger tips. I can see previous content, activity levels, engagement levels and a lot more. It’s then easy to add influencers as contacts in BuzzStream Outreach.”  Adam Connell, Blogging Wizard

“As a PR practitioner, I typically have a million tabs open and am constantly clicking through each one while prospecting. Thankfully, BuzzStream Discovery allows me to keep my focus within a single platform. Needless to say, my productivity skyrockets while using this feature and my dream of participating in Tabless Thursday is becoming more of a reality every day.” Britt Klontz, Distilled

“At Page One Power we use BuzzStream on a daily basis to help deliver the best possible link building service for our clients. BuzzStream is already one of our most valued tools, and the addition of BuzzStream Discovery has taken it to another level as we can now easily identify niche influencers and industry leaders. By recognizing these people we can cultivate important relationships that support the success of our link campaigns.” Andrew Dennis, Page One Power

“BuzzStream Discovery presents powerful data that marketers can use to build stronger relationships with publishers. Having this data right at our fingertips is game changing, and BuzzStream Discovery integrates seamlessly with what I consider the best CRM for our industry.” Kelsey Libert, FRACTL

“The ability to dive into influencer networks is unparalleled. I’ve never had results return so quickly for a tool processing this much social data. Overall I’m really impressed.” John-Henry Scherck, DocSend

“I was excited to hear that Buzzstream would be launching a Discovery component to their solution and impressed with the depth of information provided. Discovering and building relationships have been a key to our online marketing success. I am looking forward to using this application and making our program work that much more effective in the long run.” Derek Edmond, KOMARKETING

What We’re Working On

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be rolling out additional features into BuzzStream Discovery, but our top priorities right now are data accuracy and performance.

Performance

We’ve put a ton of work into making the search capabilities as fast as possible. We believe that the capabilities are dramatically more valuable if results come back to you as quickly as a Google search. We’re seeing sub-second search results for short search terms (one to three words) and when the system is not under high load. We’re now working to improve speed with longer search phrases…we’ll also have a much better sense of what we need to do to ensure that performance scales as we see large numbers of people running concurrent searches.

Accuracy

There are two areas where we want to improve the accuracy of the data in the system. The first area is de-duplication and the second is duplicate content.

In our test data set, we’re seeing de-duplication issues in approximately 5% of influencer profiles. This manifests itself in two ways. In the first, we’ve failed to correctly tie together all known presences of an author into a single profile. This can do funny things, such as returning multiple influencers in a search who are in fact the same author. This is demonstrated by our friend Neil Patel, who (unless he has cloned himself) is appearing much more often than he should in some areas of our app 🙂

The other way the de-duplication issue manifests is to incorrectly associate one author with another author of the same name on a single profile. This can result in incorrect attribution of content and domains.

Another known issue is returning duplicate content. In some cases you will see an article returned multiple times as though it were a separate article in each case

There are other bugs that we’re working on, but these are the most pressing ones. If you come across things that seem incorrect, please don’t hesitate to let us know so we can address it.

Thanks and Shoutouts

In the course of developing this product, we’ve gotten absolutely fantastic feedback from customers. They have been critical in helping us understand some of the more nuanced problems of influencer marketing, and I really can’t thank them enough. Big shout out to the following people who have been kind enough to lend us their time and expertise:

• Matthew Barby (hubspot.com)
• Adam Connell (bloggingwizard.com)
• Danny Ashton & Gisele Navarro (neomam.com)
• Derek Edmond (komarketingassociates.com)
• Andy Killworth (legendcorp.com)
• Britt Klontz (distilled.net)
• Gianluca Fiorelli (iloveseo.net)
• Irene Lewis (softwareadvice.com)
• Jason Nurmi (zillow.com)
• Lauren Grabowski (seerinteractive.com)
• Marta Rey (globalleadsgroup.com)
• Ryan DiMillo (unclebobs.com)
• Stephanie Beadell (briggsby.com)
• Tanya Korobka (caliberi.com)
• Leigh Wendinger (fun.com)
• Harry K.  (evosem.com)
• Ryan McLaughlin (riise.co)
• Brittany Potter (rosetta.com)
• Andrea Lehr, Christina Lachowyn, & Kelsey Libet (frac.tl)
• Holly Borchardt (v9seo.com)
• Kevin King & Sean Smith (sproutsocial.com)
• Jochem Kootstra (iprospect.com)
• Lindsay Speer (creatingchangeconsulting.com)
• Tate Handy (digitalthirdcoast.net)

Try BuzzStream Discovery for Free

Ready to jump into BuzzStream Discovery?  Get started here! If you have a BuzzStream account, you can use your existing username and password to sign in. Otherwise, you can create a free account in just a few seconds.

We’d love to know what you think of the product. Drop us an email at support@buzzstream.com, leave a comment, or tweet us @BuzzStream. We’ll be paying careful attention to each and every message we get so we can make BuzzStream Discovery as useful as possible.