BuzzStream Link-Building Management Tool Review

If you’re a front-line link-builder, you’ll be interested in reading about the new BuzzStream link-building tool.  When I say tool, it is a tool in the sense of how link-building should be viewed…relationship-building.  It really is not an automated, link-building machine!

Link-building Relationships

If you think of a BuzzStream as a sort of database management service, that both highlights opportunities for link-building and also helping you to manage correspondence with prospective link providers, then I think that would be pretty close to the mark.

Importance of Social Media for Business

Over the last week, Hitwise has posted about both growing social media as a source of customers for online retailers and how web users are spending more time on social media networks that at online retailers.  The prominence and value of online social media has never been greater.

It’s this reason why I am so interested in social media monitoring tools, such as my Radian6 review, and various other posts online about online reputation management and SEO/social media integration (case studies are my favourite – feel free to recommend some!).  So to follow on from this I put my self down as a Beta tester for the Buzz Stream tool, following a recommendation from my fellow SEO consultant, Gab Goldenburg.

Customer Relationship Management for Link-Building

Buzzstream, like many tools of this help those looking for relational link-building opportunities…opportunities to engage with champions / influencers of your services / content, or maybe get talking with webmasters as part of the niche.  I think where I see it’s greatest benefits are in the fact that it helps find markets for engagement, and thus can help build these prospects into customers / link-providers.  In a way, it is working to be follow the lines of a customer relationship management principles…

Please note that this is just one of the range of dashboards that you can view at differing levels of detail.

Link-building Management & Performance

Many people regard link-building as a form of selling, and more so than any, ‘manual’ link-building probably is.  And with all sales process, it’s helpful to break this stage down to see where you or your link-building team are performing well, and Buzzstream helps you to do this. Part of the dashboard graphically represents:

• The number of links you have acquired
• The number of link partners you have gained
• The number of links under review
• The number of link requests you have had rejected

This means that across the different stages / types of links you can see where you or your team are performing the best and take decisions to either capitalise on those strengths or look to improve your approach…excellent stuff for link-building managers too.

BuzzBox

There’s a clever little feature for link-builders, whereby if you BCC a pre-designated buzzstream email address, such as 1234_Ben_M@buzzbox.buzzstream.com it will copy all your correspondence into your BuzzStream account – great stuff for staying on top of where you’re up to with your link opportunities and relationships….an item, very much geared-up for the frontline link-builder.

Future Developments

One of the most exciting things to come (for me at least) is the future release of the buzz monitoring element of the tools.  Having exchanged a few emails with Buzzstream Co-founder, Jeremy Bencken, I raised the point about how this will differ from Radian 6 or similar social media monitoring tools.  I’m sure he won’t mind me sharing this comment with you, it said:

The key difference between what we’re doing and Radian6 is that our focus is engagement with influencers (journalists, bloggers, Twitters), and we’re *not* doing the social media monitoring piece. Our ideal customer will use low-cost tools like Trackur, Vibemetrix, Filtrbox, or Scout Labs or free tools like SocialMention, Addict-o-matic, BuzzDing to find engagement opportunities.

We step in once they find an influencer and want to engage them (we’re building some time-saving tools around helping you do that). I like to think of it as the difference between Jigsaw (where you find sales leads) and Salesforce. We’re similar to Salesforce, except we’re tailored to managing influencers and engagement across the social sphere.

Things I would like to see develop in the future…

Link-building Opportunities & Search Queries: BuzzStream does a great job of simplifying the management of relationships, something that all marketers might appreciate learning more about, especially in social media, but I think it could do more to find opportunities.  It helps you run wild card queries, using variable keywords in search queries, designed to help find opportunities but I think they could do more, see the image for what’s currently available:

…it is in the Beta version though of course so I expect they will as they queries are relatively easy to set-up.

Link-building Reporting: I’d also like to see a reportng tool where selected paramters could build a report, preferably in .csv, that I could use to feed into my client reports.  There are currently web-viewable reports of recent history, but nowhere can I find any export facility.  Maybe that’s another item to come.

The BuzzStream wrap-up

Overall though, I think they have made a very helpful database and facility to contact market influencers online, whereby it does each task that it tries to very well indeed, remarkably well in fact for a Beta version.  There’s loads more details to BuzzStream to what I have covered here but I hope this provides a helpful taster of it’s potential usage, and even a little feedback to Jeremy and the BuzzStream team…and now for what you’ve been waiting for…

**20 Free BuzzStream Beta Invitations Available**

For all those interested in being a Beta tester for what looks set to be an excellent tool focussed on making manual link-builders more efficient, click on the following link – but be warned as there is only 20 invites available!

• http://tinyurl.com/djyjnz

UPDATE:

I have just got the following email (15th October) on some interesting developments with Buzzstream…
Hi Ben,

I’m writing to let you know about some exciting new features we just added to BuzzStream for Link Management. Please take a minute to check them out:

Real-Time Social Media Monitoring

Want to know one of the most effective link building strategies? It’s social media monitoring combined with personalized outreach. BuzzStream now makes it easy to monitor news, find bloggers and site owners whose interests align with your content promotion campaign, sort them by authority, research them with our BuzzMarker tool, and track your outreach efforts automatically.

With BuzzStream you now can monitor mainstream news, blogs, Twitter, and dozens of social media sources to find key influencers. Our research tools make it a snap to build a detailed dossier on a contact, save them to our CRM, track your outreach, and identify links you’ve received.

And if you manage reputation management, your life just got a little easier. BuzzStream now allows you to define a set of competitive brands and track multiple sentiment ratings for the same post. This enables you to create more accurate and useful share-of-voice and competitive sentiment reports.

To setup your social media monitoring searches, visit: http://app.buzzstream.com/monitors

Import & Export — with Linkscape and SEOMoz support

Have a spreadsheet of existing links and pending link prospects? BuzzStream makes it easy to import them with step-by-step instructions. Email us for import templates for SEOMoz Linkscape and Yahoo Site Explorer (a great way to import your own or competitors’ backlinks). We also know the importance of protecting your cloud data so we’ve added the ability to create a comprehensive data export back to CSV.

Agency Client Management

Want to use BuzzStream with multiple clients? Now you can manage your clients via with a master agency account and group each clients’ media contacts, outreach history, social media monitoring searches, and media monitoring results into their respective sub-accounts. Account-level controls allow some or all of your staff access to the information, which preserve the benefits of collaboration while keeping things private and organized. To enable client sub-accounts, go to Settings > Projects > Create New Project.

New Pricing

We’ve tailored plans to better meet the needs of SEOs at different ends of the spectrum:

• FREE: 2 users, 25 contacts, 3 monitoring searches
• Solo – $29/mo: 1 user, 1,500 contacts, 10 monitoring searches
• Basic – $49/mo: 4 users, 1,500 contacts, 10 monitoring searches
• Plus – $129/mo: 12 users, 4,000 contacts, 10 monitoring searches
• Premium – $249/mo: Unlimited Users, 15,000 contacts, 10 monitoring searches

Thanks for all your feedback and support through our beta program. If you have any questions, need a hand importing your existing links, or just want a quick demo to help you get started, please don’t hesitate to email me.

Sincerely,
Paul May
Co-founder, BuzzStream