40 Using Buzzsumo to Find Highly Viral Stories

If you are looking to hone your fact-checking skills, you may want to find highly viral stories. Your own Facebook and Twitter feeds are good sources for such stories.

Sometimes, you will want to get outside your filter bubble and see the stories that other folks are sharing. There are a number of tools you can use to find viral stories. For example, Buzzsumo is an option that is simple to use. Go to Buzzsumo.com.

Put in a search term, like “cancer.” Buzzsumo will return the most shared stories on the topic of cancer. Filter them by date, and we can look at the stories for the past week.

Facebook engagements is not purely about shares and encompasses other actions as well. It is a good metric of how viral the story is.

The free version of Buzzsumo only lets you view the top results and limits the number of searches you can perform per day; however, it is often enough access to enable you to find an interesting story to fact-check. The “Cancer Cure Genius Silenced by Medical Mafia” result is interesting. Its inflammatory language is a good indicator that the claims in it are likely to be overstated.