Tools for Content Research

[mihaiaperghis]

Hey,

I'm looking for a few tools to help me with the research phase of content marketing in order to get more efficiency and scalability out of it.

I've been using standard tools like Google's Alerts, Trends, Related Searches and Autocomplete, as well as some competitive analysis, but I'm looking to dive in the social medium to research the audience and get some content ideas, both on what my audience is interested in overall and on what people are talking about related to my main keywords.

So basically, I'm looking for tools that can help me with:

• discovering the main interests of my audience and/or competitors' audience
• discovering popular topics related to my keywords, mainly in social media
• anything else that can help with content research and ideas

PS: Anything with an API is a plus!

PS2: Something along the lines of what Tellagence Discover does would be pretty awesome (the product itself is a bit expensive for my needs). I've also looked at Bottlenose, but it seems to be focused more on current trends rather than audience research. Tweet Archivist looks interesting for grabbing tweets/links from my audience then parsing them into a word cloud or something like that, has anyone tried it?

Cheers!

[DonnaDuncan]

Hi Mihai.

I recommend an API-enabled tool created by Daniel Butler at SEOGadget. It's called the Content Strategy Generator Tool. It taps into a variety of social media platforms including Digg, Twitter and Google Insights to allow you to identify trending topics and possible outreach candidates - editors and / or bloggers who might be interested in the content you produce. It's a great tool!

[mihaiaperghis]

This post is deleted!

[BlueprintMarketing]

Scribecontent.com by copy blogger as well as SEM rush and word stream

[mihaiaperghis]

Thanks for the answer Donna, that is indeed an useful tool.

However my clients are in non-English speaking countries, which is why I want to leverage social media more for researching audience interests and trending topics.

[mihaiaperghis]

Thanks Thomas, however those tools work mainly for English-based content. I'm looking for something that would be fairly language independent.

[gfiorelli1]

Unfortunately country agnostic tools don't exist (or that's my experience).

I know your pain, being it mine too.

By the way those tools can offer you good insights (and can be personalized, as the Content Discovery tool by SEOGadget)

Another technique, especially for understanding what the influencers in your geography/niche are sharing - hence what kind of content may have more social echo - is the one described by Richard Baxter here.

Then, you should not forget Topsy.

[mihaiaperghis]

Thanks for input Gianluca!

I've actually seen that deck before, I'll definitely give it some more attention, especially in my content planning stage.

Since asking the question I've delved around some options and found the following free tools for what I need (which is mainly the persona research stage of my content marketing strategies):

• Google Display Planner - get demographic data and interests/topic suggestions based on keywords; very nice to have for the incipient phase in persona development
• Google Analytics - the Demographics and Interests recent additions help test and improve your existing personas with data from your own visitors; becomes better as you get more traffic
• Social Mention - their Top Keywords column allows you to see what words are usually associated with your keyword on different channels; it only shows you top 10 keywords, but then again it's free