If you’re looking for marketing tips, tools and strategies to build your small business – and are open to looking beyond your own brand, how about doing some competitive analysis?

Buzzsumo is a really cool tool and resource that allows you to research your competitor’s content marketing – and much more. It also shares key word rich articles that are trending, and identifies influencers and fans in your industry.

Here’s how it works.

Type your competitor’s website into the Buzzsumo search bar and you’ll see what content has been published, what’s been the most popular, how many views there were – and just as important, who’s amplifying the content.

What’s the benefit?

Wouldn’t you like to know what titles received the most shares, on what social networks, content format type and keywords?  Plus, be able to check out influencers and their following?  You can create a list of fans who are following your competition, check out the links they clicked through – and sort by content type (infographic, video, article, etc), social media platform and date.

You can also get an alert when your brand is mentioned, but you probably already knew you could do that with a Google Alert, for published work. Hint: if you haven’t set up a Google Alert on yourself, your competition, customers and prospects, you’re missing out.

There are other companies similar to Buzzsumo, and they’re listed below. Just remember, if you’re monitoring your competition – and that includes using LinkedIn in private non-creepy mode – be sure you have a plan to take advantage of this intel. Your time and this information is valuable.