New Competitive Content Insights Available for Free

Understanding what content generates high social engagement can play a big role in meeting marketing goals. Translating this understanding into takeaways for your content strategy can help you organically and quickly build awareness of your content, affinity for your brand, and feedback cues from your audience about what makes content worth engaging with.

In February, we announced the launch Content Exploration to help achieve these benefits by providing visibility into what topics, articles, and sites an audience is most engaged with.

Today, we’re excited to bring some of these same insights to our free Site Overview tool. In addition to the competitive analysis and keyword opportunities already available for millions of websites, Site Overview now provides insights about the topics and articles getting the most social engagement for over 450,000 websites.

How to Gain Content Marketing Insights from Free Social Engagement Analysis

The new social engagement analysis on Site Overview is based on the articles published by a site or its competitors. It contains:

• Top social topics: topics that get the most engagement on social media
• Social engagement: the amount of social engagement the content from each site gets
• Popular articles: articles that get the most engagement on social media

We’ll go into these three in more detail below.

Top Social Topics

Top Social Topics shows what topics a website and its competitors are publishing content on that generate high engagement.

To determine these topics, we first analyze articles that have been publicly shared on Twitter and Reddit, and assign topics to all articles based on the article contents.

We then determine which topics had the highest total engagement by looking at public Twitter and Reddit posts that mention articles published by a website and its competitors. (Total engagement is the sum of all engagement with public Tweets or Reddit posts that mention an article published by one of these sites.)

You can use the topics listed to determine:

• High-ROI topic areas: Use the average engagement metric to understand how successful individual articles are amongst an audience in different topic areas.
• Competitive content gaps: Is there a particular topic area in which your competitors are investing in content and seeing success in the form of high average engagement? If these are topics you haven’t published content on yet, consider these as areas of opportunity to produce future content.
• Untapped topic areas: See a topic with high average engagement and a low number of articles? This could indicate an area of opportunity to create content for a highly engaged audience in a topic space that isn’t yet overcrowded.

After you’ve discovered an interesting topic area, you can use Content Exploration to drill down into subtopics with the highest engagement and view the articles in those topics generating the most shares. Use what you learn to determine the subject of your next article.

Social Engagement

Social Engagement shows the number of articles and average engagement with articles that were mentioned in publicly shared Twitter or Reddit posts for a site and its competitors.

You can use these metrics to determine what sites are producing content that resonates with their audience, and what sites to analyze further to see how they’ve been successful.

 

Popular Articles

Popular Articles shows the articles with the highest engagement on Twitter and Reddit, published by a website or its competitors.

Analyze these articles to determine what makes it worth sharing, and how you can replicate that success with your own unique angle. To take this a step further, use Content Exploration to view the top Tweets that shared the article to understand what people are saying about it.

Improve the Performance of Your Content

After you’ve taken full advantage of the free social engagement insights provided by Site Overview, sign up for a free trial of Alexa’s Advanced plan for unlimited access to Content Exploration. You’ll also gain access to tools for additional competitive research, audience analysis, and keyword research tools, as well as SEO capabilities like recurring Site Audits.

Try it now for 14 days free.