I’ve written/vlogged about my love for Buzzsumo, a free tool that works wonders for finding click-worthy content to share.

But there’s a shiny new content research tool on the block, and it may just be giving Buzzsumo a run for its money.

It’s called EpicBeat by Epictions, and it promises to “Power your marketing with trends, content and influencers that matter.”

This week I put it to the test to see how it stacks up against my beloved Buzzsumo. Disclosure: EpicBeat gave me a free Plus membership so I could try out all the bells and whistles. Thanks, guys!

First Look

When you log onto EpicBeat, you’re prompted with an entry field much like Buzzsumo where you can type in any topic.

I decided to go with ‘fitness,’ in the hopes that maybe researching this topic will make up for actually doing it.

After typing in your topic and hitting enter, you’ll be taken to the ‘Overview’ screen, which now begins to look quite different from Buzzsumo (major points for a beautiful user interface. It’s really nice and easy to navigate).

Up top you’ll see Insights on the topic you entered, which includes the average number of shares, comments and “applause” on any given post within the topic.

Applause is a metric EpicBeat came up with to include not just the major players (Facebook, Pinterest, etc.), but also more niche outlets like Reddit, Stumbleupon, Vimeo, etc.

Beneath that, you’ll see a list of the top performing content for the topic you typed in, along with its stats for shares, comments and applause.

This is useful in selecting popular, trending content to share on your brand’s page.

One cool feature of the Overview section is the ability to sort content by Format and get highly accurate results.

For example, if you search by Video, EpicBeat will return not only straight videos, like YouTube or Vimeo links, but also blog posts and articles where the main focus is a video.

It works the same way for other content formats, like infographics and podcasts.

One downside to EpicBeat’s content search tool is that for now, it doesn’t include links shared via Twitter.

In a controversial move in 2015, Twitter stopped allowing API access by third-party apps. That’s the techie way of saying that outside platforms can no longer get access to Twitter’s data—at least not for free.

Buzzsumo does display results from Twitter, but apparently they had to pay big bucks to be able to do so. Bummer.

While it’s definitely not a deal-breaker, it’s a feature I would love to see EpicBeat add in the future.

Going Deeper

Now let’s take a look at some of the deeper content insights you can get using EpicBeat.

This is where I think the platform really shines and provides information that’s useful not just for when you’re sharing content, but when you’re creating content on a topic as well.

Click the Content Insights tab. You’ll be shown a whole bunch more useful information about your topic of choice, including the best days to publish, the most popular length for posts, and the best performing platforms for this kind of content.

So let’s pretend I’m about to produce a new piece of fitness content. Going off this data, I can tell that statistically, it’ll be likely to perform well if it’s:

• Published on a Tuesday
• Under 500 words
• In listicle format
• Shared on Pinterest

That’s pretty specific, right? And very useful if I’m trying to get maximum shares on my content.

Community & Influencers

Another cool (and free!) feature of Epic Beat is the ability to search for the community that surrounds your topic, and the top influencers in that niche.

In the Community tab, you can see the following:

• Retweeters: people who are most likely to retweet content on your topic
• Responders: people who are most likely to respond to content about this topic
• Original posters: people who independently share content about this topic (highly valuable for brands)
• Reciprocal followers: people in this niche who are likely to follow back if you follow them

Using these four data points combined, you could create a solid list of 25-50 “key targets”—people you’re going to consistently engage with in an effort to get them to amplify your posts. If you’re a brand, this should be a key component of your overall social media strategy.

Finally, you can use the Influencers tab to see a list of the most influential people related to your topic.

Get It!

This platform has a ton more features, but I found the ones mentioned above were most relevant to me as a blogger and marketer.

Overall, I really like the look and feel of EpicBeat and how user-friendly it is. They’ve clearly put a lot of work into figuring out what content is useful to marketers, and how to display it in a way that makes sense.

Will I be giving up Buzzsumo? Not just yet (that whole thing about first loves, you know), but I’ll definitely be incorporating EpicBeat into my content and social strategy moving forward.

Want to test-drive it for yourself? Sign up here.

You can use most of the features I mentioned above in the Free version of the platform, or you can opt for the Plus package to get access to a whole bunch of upgrades, like multiple content alerts, influencers for multiple platforms and data export capabilities.

HEADS UP—when you sign up for EpicBeat Plus before April 11, you can get a yearly package at 50% off. Pretty sweet.

Want to be first to know about other great apps and discounts for marketers? Get it in my newsletter by subscribing below!

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Tami Brehse

Tami is a television news anchor turned digital marketing consultant who helps small businesses achieve their PR and marketing goals.

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