Great content starts with error-free and grammatically correct writing. But it’s hard to keep track of your writing, especially if you have other things to worry about, i.e., publishing, promoting, etc. Grammarly Premium helps you by automatically detecting writing errors that you can fix with a click of a button!

But before we begin with this review, let’s identify the things that I look for in a grammar-checking tool to measure how good it is:

• Usability – Is it easy to use? Can it be used on different platforms or devices?
• Proofreading – Does it spot grammar mistakes and provide the correct suggestions effectively?
• Productivity – Does it help me improve my writing?

Also, to clarify, I am not reviewing the free version of Grammarly. Instead, I am examining the paid version of Grammarly, which is Grammarly Premium.

Now we have those things out of the way, let’s dive straight into the burning question:

What do you get with Grammarly Premium?

First, let’s focus on the available features of the Grammarly Premium tool.

Insights

The Document Insights feature allows you to crunch the numbers and raw data about the article.

Depending on your goals for the article, you’ll have your hands complete with the information found here. Personally, the Readability section is the most important one here.

It shows you how easy or difficult to read your article is.

Update Goals

Choose the type of document you are writing about for the tool to edit your content accordingly. Every time you start, the General document type is chosen. If you want a specific type to be used, you can select from Academic, Business, Technical, Medical, Creative, and Casual.

For example, suppose you chose Business > Article/Blog post option. In that case, Grammarly will detect contractions (you’re, I’m, and others) and misused commas to help tighten your article so your document will capture the writing style you want.

You need to refine your goals to help Grammarly Premium give you a more accurate score. By targeting the right intent, audience, style, and emotion for your article, the tool can help you produce the best article better.

This is one of the best features of the tool. Grammarly Premium assists you in writing a personalized article or content based on the type of document you want to achieve. So whether it’s writing a thesis, technical document, or a personal blog post, the paid version of Grammarly has covered you!

Premium Alerts

For paid users, they can further improve their articles about these grammar and spelling variables:

• Punctuation – Corrects missing and misused punctuation
• Conventions – Checks spacing, capitalization, and dialect-specific spelling
• Formality – Checks for appropriate formality level
• Conciseness – Eliminates wordiness and redundancy
• Clarity – Identifies confusing sentences and overlong paragraphs
• Variety – Provides synonyms for repeated words
• Vocabulary – Replaces weak words with more precise synonyms

While the grammar and punctuation errors spotted in the premium alerts aren’t crucial, the little things affect the article’s quality. This spell checker tool makes your job much easier as a result.

Plagiarism

Turning this on lets you see if your document or the document you are editing has been plagiarized from an online source without proper attribution. Grammarly Premium’s built-in plagiarism checker scans your document and runs it through 8 billion pages online.

Once it spots a plagiarized text, its built-in Citation Generation will create the citation for you using three styles — MLA, APA, and Chicago. So even if you do not know the citation format for your paper, Grammarly has got you covered!

Human proofreader

If you’re not confident with the article and are not satisfied with how you edited it, you can ask for help from an actual proofreader.

While this is an extra cost on top of your Premium subscription, it’s worth every penny if you want to get your article edited and maintain its readability for humans.

How to use Grammarly Premium

There are three ways that you can use this tool for your writing:

1. Chrome Extension
2. Browser version
3. Native Grammarly app
4. Microsoft Word add-on

Grammarly Chrome Extension

Once you download this extension for your Google Chrome, you can enjoy its features while browsing online. In addition, the extension will aid you in writing from your email provider, like Gmail.

Upon clicking on the red dot at the bottom-right side of the window, you will open the editor within Chrome.

The extension also works on blogging sites like WordPress, Tumblr, and Blogger, as well as other sites where you can enter text.

If you prefer using Mozilla Firefox, there is also a Grammarly add-on, which works the same way as the Chrome extension.

Grammarly Online Editor

If you want to edit your article straight from Grammarly, you need to log in to your Grammarly account from the website.

Once you log in, you can start with a new document, edit existing ones you have uploaded or saved, or export the articles kept in the app to your hard drive.

When you click on the document icon to write a new post, you will be directed to a minimalist text editor.

This is a great place to write your article and focus on the content without being distracted by the different features of your usual word processor.

If you have an existing article that you want to edit with spelling errors and such, you can upload it and spot spelling mistakes automatically.

If links and images are featured in your article, they will not show on the Grammarly editor. However, you can reaccess them when you download the article after editing it.

When editing the article, click on the “Correct with Assistant” button on the top-right green button of the screen.

Once you’ve fixed the article, download the file, and you will see that the changes will appear as comments from Grammarly.

If you are an editor, you may want to keep the comments so your writer can see the changes made in the article. For professional writers and bloggers, you can delete all the comments at once from your word processor and send the post to your client or blog.

Native Grammarly Desktop app

You can download the native app for Windows if you prefer running Grammarly Premium as a separate program. The program takes up approximately 46MB of your hard drive, has the same UI, and feels like the browser version.

Microsoft Office add-on

You can edit your articles using the paid version of Grammarly straight from Microsoft Word. Then, you only need to download the add-on file from the site.

Unfortunately, I have not tried Grammarly on Microsoft Word because I use WPS Writer as my word processor. More on this later.

Google Docs

You’re in for a treat if you write your articles on Google Docs. Grammarly now supports editing straight from the writing tool.

The problematic words and phrases are underlined in red. Hover your mouse to see the suggestions and make the corrections.

Currently, the Google Docs feature of Grammarly is still in beta, which explains the limited options available. Over time, however, we may see improvements until it fully integrates with the software. I’m just happy that the feature now exists since I’m a heavy Google Docs user.

Grammarly Business

If you have more than three writers on your team (including yourself) and want to ensure that all writers enjoy the benefits provided by Grammarly, then the Business plan is for you.

Using Grammarly Business allows you to create a tone profile and style guide that will be implemented across all members. This way, all written content by your team will be uniform, creating consistency that clients look up among writing teams.

Prices start at $15/month per member. It decreases to $14.5/month for 10-49 members and $12.5/month for 50-149 members.

Is Grammarly Premium worth the price?

Grammarly Premium is a paid writing software that you can buy for the following plans:

• Monthly – $29.95 (billed again after a month)
• Quarterly – $19.98/ month (billed as one payment of USD 59.95 for four months)
• Annually – $11.66/ month (billed as one payment of USD 139.95, good for one year)

If you think the features I discussed above will be helpful for you, then Grammarly Premium is definitely worth the price!

Personally, the Grammarly’s cost is well worth every cent because it establishes grammar rules for me to follow, resulting in me writing consistent articles and posts for my clients.

However, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

It’s best to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using this tool based on what we’ve discussed.

Pros and cons

Now that we have the main features, let’s take a quick look at using Grammarly Premium to improve your writing.

PRO: Helpful for non-native English writers

While I pride myself on providing great content in English as a non-native speaker, there are still spelling errors that slip through the cracks.

The mistakes may not be as crucial considering the meat of the content, but I take pride in my job. So every error is a chink in my armor.

With Grammarly Premium, I can correct my mistakes and provide clients with impeccable content writing services.

PRO: Saves time in checking your posts

If you are a freelance writer, the last thing you want to do is review the article you just finished writing for mistakes.

Before doing this, you may need to step out and take a breather or sleep on it to have a fresh and well-rested set of eyes that can spot errors.

However, imagine the hours and days you wasted by taking a break or sleeping on the article when you could have sent the report to your client or site for review.

Therefore, instead of running through your post again, Grammarly Premium will spot possible errors for you as you write your post. Then, you can click on the most appropriate suggestions or edit accordingly.

Also, Grammarly Premium boasts of spotting 250 grammatical mistakes in a document. I’m not completely sure what those mistakes are, as no list on their website reveals this (and rightfully so). However, the grammatical mistakes are organized under five categories:

• Contextual Spelling
• Grammar
• Punctuation
• Sentence Structure
• Style

PRO: Makes editing a breeze

If you are an editor, Grammarly Premium will spot the errors for you! Better yet, you can upload the written work on Grammarly and download a detailed report of the writer’s errors and their cumulative score.

Use the score as the basis for grading their writing performance.

This is perfect if you have yet to set editorial guidelines in place for your writers to follow. While you are working on that, Grammarly will serve as a more than capable guidelines system for computing the readability of the articles using different factors.

If you want to edit the article using Grammarly, all you need to do is hover over the suggestions in green and click on them to apply the changes.

You will not have to type out the suggestions; you can edit the article by clicking on them.

You can undo the change and revert to the old word or phrase if you mistakenly clicked on the suggestion.

If you are editing content based on style, the tool lets you choose the kind of style for your article so it can spot errors based on the style you chose to provide you with better suggestions.

Of course, I do not suggest you rely solely on Grammarly Premium to edit articles. You still need to check and see if the suggestions are acceptable to a human reader. But more on that later.

CON: Vocabulary enhancement suggestions are inconsistent

The vocabulary enhancements feature is a hit or miss. It suggests synonyms for overused words and phrases. As a result, the feature offers some awkward suggestions at times.

I understand that the enhancements are suggestions for a reason — you do not have to follow them if you do not feel that they provide a better alternative for the overused word or phrase. However, this is also why you still need to edit the article your way instead of completely relying on Grammarly Premium for spotting and correcting the errors.

CON: Add-on not available to other word processors

Grammarly Premium is available to Microsoft Word only as an add-on. However, if you prefer using a different word processor like WPS Writer or Open Office, you won’t be able to enjoy Grammarly Premium as much.

While this issue may be a minor quibble, this could drive other writers away from using Grammarly Premium.

Grammarly Review: Verdict

Video summary created using InVideo.

So, what do I think of this version of Grammarly? using the criteria mentioned earlier, below is an abridged version of the review about this editing tool:

In this Netpeak Checker review, you will learn everything you need to know about this URL analyzer tool.

This isn’t your usual SEO tool, mind you.

If you want to break down every URL you come across with using different SEO parameters to help you make an informed decision for your campaign, then this is for you!

Great content? Check.

Fast-loading site? Check.

Impressive backlink profile? Check.

Despite observing the best SEO practices, you still find your site at the bottom of the pile.Why is that?

Hours spent on doing all these things, all for nothing.

This is probably you right now:

via GIPHY

SEO is so competitive nowadays that your site will barely make a dent in your industry despite how optimized your site is. Tried-and-true tactics no longer work in general – you need something new and fresh to maximize your results of your efforts.

In fact, a simple tweak to help you boost your site’s organic search performance matters. It’s not about the depth of the tactic you will implement. Sometimes, even the smallest changes in your current SEO approach can make the biggest impact.

Therefore, instead of thinking big, why not think granular?

For example, instead of looking at a page as a whole, why not analyze the page using the different factors that govern organic search?

This reason is why you probably need Netpeak Checker in your SEO arsenal more than ever.

Why do you need to analyze URLs?

When analyzing a URL of a page, whether it’s from your site or competitors’, you probably look at it from a user’s perspective. You look at how fast it loads, how informative the content is, and how easy the presentation of the content is to the eyes.

At the same time, you also want to balance that viewpoint from the perspective of a search spider.

I’m aware that it’s best to think like a human when it comes to building your site pages if you want them to rank on Google search for your target keywords. By creating content that people will find helpful, you can attract more site traffic and retain them to browse other pages on your site.

However, you want search spiders also to love your site. That means:

• Looking at your site’s backlink profile (same with your competitors!)
• Analyze your site’s social media performance (while social media has no direct effect on SEO, your performance in this channel is considered a social signal, which could have an indirect effect on your organic ranking)
• Compare pages based on SEO parameters of well-known services (Moz’s Domain Authority, Majestic’s Trust Flow and Citation Flow, and more)
• Evaluate competitors based on different SEO factors and see how you fare against them (also shows you what you need to improve on)
• and more!

Having this data at your disposal allows you to dig deeper into your SEO campaign. It’s probably more work, but as mentioned earlier, a potential change in your strategy for the better could be the difference from last to first place on organic search rankings.

What is Netpeak Checker?

Netpeak Checker is a mass SEO analysis tool developed by Netpeak Software.

While as crucial as analyzing URLs is, the actual process of doing so is a royal pain in the ass.

To analyze a page, you must use different tools to unearth the other SEO metrics. For example, to find its Domain Ranking, you’ll need to log in to your Moz account to find the score there. You need to log in to Majestic for the Trust and Citation Flows.

In other words, you will have to cross-check with reliable tools to find the data you need to determine the SEO factors of a URL. A single URL could take over an hour to get all the data required for your SEO research. If you’re to include the other URLs to review, it’ll probably take you weeks and months to fetch all the data before you can fully conduct your analysis!

With Netpeak Checker, you can review as many pages as you want and SEO factors as possible with a click of a button. From here, all you need to do is sit back and relax, as the tool will do the heavy lifting for you.

Instead of the weeks and months of struggling with each URL, Netpeak Checker can help you analyze hundreds of URLs and data in minutes!

How to Use Netpeak Checker

There are many uses for Netpeak Checker as part of your SEO strategy. Here are some to get you started:

• Find sites to submit guest posts
• Analyze your (or competitors’) backlink profile
• Determine how optimized your site pages are and get an overview of your overall site performance

For the sake of this example, let’s do the third way on how to use Netpeak Checker.

Launching the tool

Once you subscribe to an account, download and open Netpeak Checker from your desktop. The tool is currently available for Windows users only, but they’ll make it available to Mac OS and Linux users soon.

The tool will take some time to load on your computer and sync with the online database. The speed depends on your hardware specs as well as your internet connection.

Netpeak also developed Netpeak Spider, which is similar to Screaming Frog SEO Spider. I could probably review this tool in the future if all goes well (Netpeak, I’m looking at you 🙂 )

Click on the Start button to launch Netpeak Checker.

Before starting a project, you want to determine the parameters that the tool will fetch from each URL you enter. Netpeak Checker can review over 1,200+ parameters (!!!) related to SEO. While you can use all parameters as you wish, you need to focus on only the most important and influential factors to help make it easier for you.

Choosing and setting up the parameters

Most of the parameters that you can gather from Netpeak Checker are free. Below are some of the ones that you should use when analyzing your URLs:

• On-page – Get down and dirty with multiple parameters to choose from under this category. Aside from the usual on-page factors (title, description, subheadings, etc.), you can also see content download time, content size, and links to social media sites to help you better understand the page’s SEO.
• Google SERP – You want to check how the URLs appear on search results by checking on the Title and Description under URL parameters. If you’re checking on homepage URLs, you may want to consider finding out the page’s indexed URLs, related pages, and site links under host parameters.
• Bing SERP – Bing could bring value to your site as the second-largest search engine in the market. You can analyze the page based on URL parameters only.
• Alexa – Global Rank is a good enough parameter to help you determine how your site stacks up to sites all over the world. If you want to focus on your performance locally, then choose Local Rank instead.
• Social shares – Find out pages with the most shares on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Stumbleupon.

To see the different parameters you can check using Netpeak Checker and the explanation for each, click here.

You can easily set up the parameters for your project by clicking on them at the left side of the dashboard.

While these parameters will help you dig deeper into the SEO performance of each URL on your list, you’ll need better data than. I’m referring to the ones provided by third-party services like Moz, Majestic, SEMrush, and others.

However, to gain access to these parameters, you need to enter the access token and other details from those sites into Netpeak Checker.

Accessing premium parameters

Click on Settings > General from the menu bar. A new window will open that will show you the parameters that you need access tokens to access.

Unless you’re subscribed to Ahrefs, Semrush, Serpstat, and others or at least have an access to their respective API/access token, I’m afraid you won’t be able to use them as part of your analysis.

However, it’s not a total waste because you can still gain access to Moz’s data from here.

While Domain Authority (DA) is only an approximation of how Google views a page, it’s still one of the most sought-after parameters in SEO. The higher the DA, the more authoritative the site is. So, if you want to determine how valuable a page, you should track its DA to get an idea.

Click on the Moz API link to visit the page to get your Access ID and Secret Key. You must be logged in to your Moz account first before going to this page.

A new window on your browser will open. Click on the Dashboard link on the upper right part of the page.

Once on the Moz API Dashboard, click the Access tab to show you the details you need to enter on Netpeak Checker.

Enter these details, and you’re set to go!

Note: If you plan on running lots of pages using lots of parameters, then you should consider using an anti-captcha and HTTP proxies from this page. Both will help you gather data efficiently without entering CAPTCHA or getting flagged by Google for asking multiple requests at a time.

Running a project

Now that you have the parameters in place, you need to enter your URLs now.

Since we want to simply get an overview of your site’s SEO performance, you can run a quick Google search using the search operator “site:”domainname.com” to unearth the links.

Before conducting your search, make sure that your search will deliver 100 results (maximum) so you can gather more pages for each query from Google.

For the sake of example, we’ll use the search operator to get the indexed pages from QuickSprout.

To download the URLs, download and activate the Mozbar to export the URLs into a CSV file.

Once the extension is activated, you will see the Export icon on the upper left-hand corner of the page. Click on that.

You will be able to download a CSV file of the first 100 results of all the indexed Quicksprout pages on Google.

Open the file and copy all the Quicksprout links on column B of the sheet.

Copy the links and go to Netpeak Checker to paste the URLs. Click on List of URLs > Enter manually and paste there and click Add.

Once you’re ready, click on the Start button. Depending on the parameters you will be using, it could take a few minutes to an hour. In the meantime, you can use your computer for other tasks as the tool continues to gather information for your project.

When the report is finished, you will receive a message at the bottom-right corner of your page.

You can export the data for further review. To download the sample of the data, click on the link below.

Download Sample Data

Analyzing the data

Now that you have the data from Netpeak Checker, it’s time to crunch the numbers and see how you want to improve Quicksprout’s SEO performance.

Here are questions that you want to ask yourself in reference to the report:

• Do your pages with titles and descriptions over 65 and 160 characters, respectively? Metadata that exceeds the suggested characters will be truncated from SERPs, which could lower your CTR. It’s best if you could shorten them so you could display the pages better.
• Are your pages loading more than four seconds? 1 second is equivalent to 1000 milliseconds which is the metric used in Netpeak Checker. If your page loads more than 4000 ms under Content Download Time, then you need to find a way to decrease the loading time. You can also use the Content Size parameter for reference. Decreasing the Content Size by compressing the images and removing Javascript is the best way to go.
• Which pages have the highest shares? Find out the pages with the most social shares on a specific channel (Facebook, Twitter, etc.). You may consider updating the pages (if they’ve been published years ago) and re-promote them to the same channel where they got lots of shares to replicate your success.
• Which pages have the highest Page Authority (PA)? This parameter from Moz allows you to determine the value of each page. You could use this information to help you spread your link juice to pages with low Page authority. For example, from your page with a high PA, link out to related internal pages with low PA to make your link juice flow to these pages.

These are just some of the many things you can do with the data gathered by Netpeak Checker. Depending on the applicable parameters you can use for any purpose you have in mind, you should be able to dig deeper with your SEO strategy by spending less time gathering data and more time developing and implementing a sustainable SEO campaign!

CLICK HERE AND SIGN UP FOR A 14-TRIAL OF NETPEAK CHECKER PLUS A CHANCE TO GET A 5% DISCOUNT FOR 1 YEAR!

The pros and cons of this tool

PROS: Time-saving SEO tool

As mentioned, Netpeak Checker allows you to unearth massive amounts of data for lots of URLs in minutes, if not seconds. You don’t need to fill out a data entry or VA position to help you manually sort out the URLs using your preferred parameters. Simply run the tool and gather the data instantly. You can then focus on more important matters, such as refining your SEO strategy to increase your site’s SEO performance.

CONS: Doesn’t provide access to premium parameters

The available parameters are decent enough to help you analyze the on-page SEO performance of each site. However, if you want to get better parameters such as search traffic, total backlinks, and others, you will have to subscribe to paid SEO tools first and get their data (with the exception of Moz.)

Also, most of the tools can go as high as $69/month, which could be too pricey for some. Therefore, you’re left with parameters that are publicly available and doesn’t give you better insights into the SEO data of each URL.

This is not a knock on Netpeak Checker as it is a great tool and offers good parameters to help you establish your baseline. My suggestion is that Netpeak could hopefully offer the tool with access to the APIs and access tokens of the premium SEO tools, even if it means hiking up the price. I think this would be helpful to all Netpeak Checker users and will definitely put it up there as a must-use tool.

PROS: Good price point

For $19/month, Netpeak checker is definitely an affordable tool. It’s not a turnkey SEO solution like SEMrush or Ahrefs, but what it does, it does great and it reflects on the pricing. As a complementary tool to your SEO strategy, the tool is something that SEO experts would be willing to pay for.

CONS: Annoying start-up process

It’s ironic that a time-saving tool can be slow and bulky at the same time, and yet Netpeak Checker manages to be exactly both.

Opening the tool feels like a drag at times. Unlike cloud-based apps, you don’t have to wait for the data to sync with your computer. Netpeak Checker not only makes you wait by syncing the data online but also brings you to a splash page that shows both Netpeak Checker and Spider. I only bought Netpeak Checker, so I shouldn’t see Netpeak Spider when opening the tool.

I understand that showing Netpeak Spider is their way of upselling the tool to Netpeak Checker. However, the fact that you keep seeing it makes the entire experience disruptive from a user experience standpoint.

Netpeak Checker review: Verdict

This video summary is created by InVideo.

Social Animal review: The Buzzsumo killer?

Before we start, I’d like to inform you that this post was titled “ContentIdeator by Content Forest: Finally, a Buzzsumo Alternative!”

It was published in 2017 – back when Content Forest was still active.

After a year or two, ContentIdeator and Content Forest are no longer available.

That’s why I’ve rewritten the post to look at another Buzzsumo alternative in Social Animal.

If you still want to read about ContentIdeator, you can view the original post with the help of Wayback Machine by clicking here.

Now that’s out of the way, are you ready to know if Social Animal can kick Buzzsumo’s butt?

Let’s find out together!

What is Social Animal?

Social Animal is a content marketing tool divided into five specific features:

• Content research – Analyze your or your competitor’s published content and break down its performance according to different metrics. Also, find trending topics that you can piggyback on to increase your online visibility.
• Content curation – Find relevant content that you can share on social media or discuss on your blog.
• Influencer outreach – Find people on Twitter related to your niche with thousands of followers who can help promote your content.
• Facebook marketing strategy builder – Search across millions and billions of Facebook posts to help you gain valuable insights. Then use the data to develop an effective strategy for this social platform.
• Competitor monitoring – Find out updates and the latest news about your competitors in different online sources

Let’s dig deeper into its features to see how you can perform these tasks using this tool.

Features of Social Animal

While reading this Social Animal review, you’re probably looking closely at what it does and see if it compares favorably to Buzzsumo.

And you have good reason to do that! You probably love Buzzsumo but you simply can’t shoulder the monthly costs.

Well, I’m happy to report that Social Animal is very similar to Buzzsumo which is a good thing!

Here’s how much they are the same, if not probably better to some extent:

Articles

If you click on the Articles link on the menu, Social Animal will show you topics that you can click on and use as inspiration to jumpstart your content research.

However, you’ll probably just find your topic using its search bar.

If you enter “content marketing,” it will show you these results:

Just like Buzzsumo, you can see the engagement numbers for each social media platform and their respective total figure.

Use this information to help you find content that people share the most in your niche.

Since there’s interest in this type of topic, you can use it as a template to create an even better version for your blog!

Now, I want to talk about the filters on the left sidebar.

If you’re not happy with the initial results, you can refine the posts that you want to see.

Here are the filters you can customize to get the best results for your search:

• Search Mode – determine whether to show published or shared content in the results
• Filter by Date – select the date range when the articles were published
• Content Type  – choose from listicles, how to guides, guest posts, and more.
• Deep Search – Type the keyword or phrase you want Social Animal to find in the articles and show them in the result. Take note: Buzzsumo does not have this feature!
• Domain – reveal posts published only on your desired domains
• Author – find content written by a particular author
• TLD – only show top-level domains on the results
• Word Count – choose how short or long the posts you want to see from the results
• Sentiment – show articles with positive, negative, and/or neutral sentiment

And that’s just one way you can use Social Animal for your content marketing efforts!

Let’s look at the other options available for each entry.

Headline Analyzer

Say you want to create the same content as the one with the most shares. In this case, it’s the article from prdaily.com.

When rewriting the post, you need to come up with an even better headline to complement your content.

The goal of the headline is not just to introduce what the article is about.

With the right headline, you can attract the most clicks when it appears on people’s social media feeds and search results.

And Social Animal has a tool that can help you create click-worthy headlines!

To do this, click on the Headline Analyzer option of the post on Social Animal.

You’ll see something similar to this:

It tells you the strengths and weaknesses of the headline. Use this information to create a better headline version for your post!

Other factors you will see to help you analyze the headlines of competitors are:

• Emotional Analysis – shows the emotions the headline evokes from readers
• Sentiment of the Headline – tells you whether the headline has a positive, negative, or neutral sentiment
• Quick Scanning Eye – reveals to you the first words people see from the headline. Also shows which among the words are rare and common.
• Dictionary and Synonym analysis – lists down similar words of words used in the headline

Using this option of Social Animal, you can be sure to come up with a headline that people will click on and read!

Add to compare

If you want to pit two high-performing articles against each other from your search, you may do so with Social Animal!

Click on the Add to Compare option for the two posts you want to analyze.

Comparing posts with the most shares gives you even more insights on how you should develop content similar to these titles.

For example, if a post received more Facebook shares that the others, then you need to see what made it more shareable on that platform and emulate its success!

View sharers

Let’s say a post generated tons of Twitter shares.

With Social Animal, you can see who those sharers are and analyze their influence.

To do this, click the View sharers link on the post you want to review.

From here, you can see who the sharers are and the number of followers and tweets they have.

Most importantly, you can export the list and reach out to them one by one once you have published a better version of the post they just shared.

Insights

Now, onto the fun part!

When writing the best content possible, you need to refer to actual and proven data.

The insights provided by tools like Social Animal helps you target the right angle for your topic to maximize its impact with your audience.

The Insights feature does exactly this:

You will see how much the topic is shared on social media, when the best times of publishing content about the topic is, and more!

The graph above shows you the number of shares and published articles about the topic attracted during that day.

However, it’s really difficult to differentiate which ones in the graph are the number of shares and published content.

More importantly, you can export the data and crunch the numbers using a spreadsheet.

Domains

If you want to see which domains generated the most engagement for the topic, then click on the Domains tab.

It shows the overall performance of the domain relative to social shares across the most popular platforms.

However, it doesn’t factor in the number of articles published in the domain about the topic, at least on this view.

Therefore, click on the Explore link to the domain that you want to analyze so you can see the articles with the most shares published in the domain.

Authors

This tab shows the most prolific writers of the topic.

Their performance is The number of social shares determine the performance of the authors.

Similar to the Domains tab, you can click on Explore to see the other articles attributed to the author.

Content analysis

If you’re about to hit “Publish” on your post draft, stop.

You need to know first which days of the week the topic gets the most shares on social media.

The Content analysis tab shows you the total or average engagement the topic gets from different platforms each day.

Judging from the results above, it’s best to never publish posts on weekends and Friday if you want to get the best results from your content.

And that’s just for this keyword! The results vary depending on your topic and niche.

Influencers

Similar to Buzzsumo’s feature, Social Animal’s Influencers feature shows you the different influencers in the keyword or topic you entered:

It shows you the Twitter users with the most followers and tweets.

You can filter the results using the options on the left sidebar to find specific influencers that suit your needs.

Personally, I feel this is where Social Animal misses the mark.

The data provided is limited and it doesn’t show more important metrics as seen on Buzzsumo (retweet and reply ratio, etc.).

Nonetheless, the results found here should at the very least help you identify whom to target once you’re ready to promote your content.

Facebook search

If you’re huge into Facebook marketing, then this Social Animal feature is right up your alley.

After connecting with your Facebook account, the tool will find posts related to your search query with the most shares and comments.

Use this information to join the conversation and build relationships with like-minded people.

Also, you can filter the results by date and post type so you generate the results you need.

As a suggestion, it would help if Social Animal can filter via language so you can exclusively get Facebook posts in English.

Analyze posts

Dig deeper on Facebook about your topic using Social Animal.

See how many published posts about your query and determine the best times, day, and content types to publish.

Also, you can view other factors like sentiment analysis, post analysis, and reaction splits.

These let you break down the Facebook activity of the topic and capitalize on aspects that your competitors haven’t worked on.

How to use Social Animal

So, that’s how Social Animal works!

If you’re a Buzzsumo lover, you can immediately spot the similarities and differences between the two.

However, one thing is certain:

Social Animal is an indispensable tool that can help you develop a solid content marketing strategy!

For now, let’s take the tool for a spin and create a project to better see how you can use it to your advantage.

Sign up for a 14-day trial by clicking here*.

Once you’re logged in, you need to create a project for your blog or site.

Enter the best keywords and competitors you want to track for your project.

If you do this correctly, you will see the most popular articles for the keyword you entered.

If you scroll down the page, you will also see the most popular influencers, domains, authors, and Facebook post about the topic.

So how can you use the information found here to build your content marketing strategy?

For example, let’s take the popular domains for example.

Click on any one of the domains to view articles published there related to your topic.

Filter the results until you find the ones that suit your needs. For instance, you want the latest content that’s published within the last week.

If you like any of the articles that appear on the results, click Share Article to share them on your social media.

Ideally, it’s best to copy the link and schedule the post using a social media management tool like SocialPilot or similar.

But the point is this:

You can find the best and most relevant content about your topic to share and curate on your social media!

Here’s another example:

Let’s say you found a new influencer to reach out to or a Facebook post that you need to engage with later.

Instead of letting them slip away from your fingers, you can save them in Social Animal instead for future reference.

This allows you to organize your data and proceed according to plan.

So, not only is Social Animal a research platform for your content marketing. It’s also a platform where you can build and develop your project from the ground up!

Finally, there’s an option called Keyword Mentions on the Projects page.

Use this option to find the latest and most relevant mentions of your keywords and competitors.

However, it’s only the graph that you see from this page.

This option would work best if you can also see links to the keyword mentions for easy access.

Regardless, the data provided by Social Animal should help you understand the topic and your competitors much better.

Social Animal price

As mentioned in the introduction, Buzzsumo is expensive as hell.

And as much as you want to discontinue using that tool, there’s no other alternative in the market that you can move to.

From what you’ve seen so far, Social Animal is indeed a legitimate replacement for Buzzsumo.

But the real question is this:

How much does it cost?

See for yourself:

For half the price of Buzzsumo, you get unlimited searches and data from your subscription.

You can also export data at least 50 times depending on your plan.

Finally, monitor and receive five (5) alerts minimum regarding your keywords and competitors to keep a tab of their activity.

Comparing its price to Buzzsumo, Social Animal is a very efficient product!

There are stark differences in some of the features. But if your goal is to develop content that works, then Social Animal is a much better choice for you.

Social Animal review: Pros and cons

So we’ve blasted through the jam-packed features of the tool.

I discussed what the tool does and some of the things it doesn’t.

But to formalize my thoughts about Social Animal, below is what I feel are the pros and cons of the tool.

But before I begin, I want to say that I don’t consider pricing as an advantage for Social Animal.

I think that pricing is correlative to the results the tool brings to the table. And in my opinion, Social Animal’s price is just right.

Just because it costs lower than Buzzsumo, it doesn’t automatically make it a “steal.”

I’ll try to explain this factor as you proceed reading the review:

Pros

• Awesome filtering features – I love how you can find the results you’re looking for by simply tweaking on filters to your needs. It’s a great way to find what you’re looking for without having to browse through all the data.
• Breaking down the topic and most shared articles is a breeze – If your purpose of using Social Animal is to create better content, then you’re in for a treat! You can compare the best-performing articles and analyze their headlines to come up with more effective ones. The Insights help validate your topic and whether or not it’s worth pursuing and writing about in your blog.
• Effective project management – You can save articles, influencers, domains, and any data from Social Animal. Do your research now and plan in advance by saving the most relevant entries for your project and perform additional research on each.

Cons

• Influencers feature provide insufficient information – The tool doesn’t show the most relevant information about the influencers. Aside from the posts and followers, there’s nothing much to know about them. What are the chances they will reply to me? What kind of topics do they tweet about the most? These questions remain unanswered by Social Animal. And this is probably the most crippling aspect of the tool. If you can’t break down the influencers according to more advanced metrics, then you can’t create an effective outreach strategy.
• Facebook Search feature feels half-baked – It does show you posts with the most engagement. And the Reaction Splits are a new touch. But I’m not very happy with the results for a single reason: it doesn’t let you filter out the language. If Social Animal can find a way to screen out non-English Facebook posts, then we’re on to something. But as of writing, this feature isn’t as impressive as it should be.

Verdict to this Buzzsumo alternative?

Now we’re at the end of this Social Animal review.

I’ve expressed everything I need to say about this alternative to Buzzsumo.

But let’s make it much simpler:

As a Buzzsumo alternative, I like Social Animal.

It does what Buzzsumo can do to a limited extent.

I think Buzzsumo is more loaded and provides better data and insights.

But from a price standpoint, Social Animal compares very favorably.

The Influencers and Facebook Posts features need more work, but the Articles and its filtering options are more than enough to justify the value of this tool.

As a stand-alone product, I enjoy using Social Animal.

As an SEO guy, I prefer tools like Serpstat to conduct my content research. But that doesn’t do justice to what Social Animal brings to the table.

At the same time, it’s not a social media management and scheduler like Social Champ and ContentStudio.

Nonetheless, if you’re looking to generate ideas for your social media activity, you can’t go wrong with this tool.

Expect to generate unique insights to creating content that resonates with your audience using Social Animal.

But the only way for you to do this is by signing up for a 14-day FREE trial*.

Video created using InVideo.