5 Best BuzzSumo Alternatives for Photography Schools

BuzzSumo is a leading content intelligence platform widely used by digital marketers to analyze what content performs best across social media and news outlets. According to their website, BuzzSumo indexes billions of articles and social posts, allowing users to discover trending topics, identify top-performing content by domain or keyword, and track brand mentions in real time. Its content discovery engine helps photography schools understand which types of visual storytelling—such as behind-the-scenes reels, student portfolio showcases, or instructor interviews—are resonating with audiences on platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter. The platform’s influencer identification tool enables schools to find photographers, educators, or alumni who are driving engagement, making it easier to build partnerships or feature guest content. BuzzSumo’s monitoring feature provides alerts for brand mentions or competitor activity, helping institutions respond quickly to emerging conversations. Its Chrome extension allows researchers to analyze content on the go, making it ideal for marketing teams that need quick insights during brainstorming sessions. While BuzzSumo doesn’t create content, it provides the strategic foundation for what content to create, making it indispensable for data-driven content planning. For photography schools, this means you can base your entire content calendar on proven performance data rather than guesswork.

Exploding Topics is a trend discovery platform designed to help marketers identify emerging trends before they go mainstream. According to their website, the platform uses proprietary algorithms to analyze search volume, social buzz, and content velocity across Google Trends, Reddit, YouTube, and news sites to surface niche topics that are gaining rapid momentum. For photography schools, this means uncovering rising interests like ‘AI photo editing for beginners,’ ‘mobile photography courses,’ or ‘sustainable darkroom practices’ before competitors do. This early insight allows schools to position themselves as thought leaders by creating content around topics that are just beginning to trend. Unlike BuzzSumo, which focuses on what’s already popular, Exploding Topics helps schools get ahead of the curve by spotting trends with 0–45 days of growth potential. The platform provides curated reports with data-backed insights, including search volume trends, related keywords, and content angles. While it doesn’t create content or manage publishing, it gives photography schools a strategic edge in content ideation—helping them create timely, high-potential blog posts, video series, or social campaigns that capture early adopters. This makes it a valuable companion tool for institutions aiming to be first movers in niche educational markets.

Blaze.ai is an AI-powered content creation platform designed to help marketers, coaches, and agencies generate brand-consistent content at scale. According to their website, Blaze.ai features an AI Brand Voice system that learns your tone, vocabulary, and style from sample text, ensuring all generated content—whether blog posts, social captions, or ad copy—sounds authentically like your brand. For photography schools, this means AI-generated content that mirrors the voice of your faculty, whether it’s poetic and artistic or technical and instructional. The platform includes an AI Blog Post Generator that creates SEO-optimized articles in seconds, and an AI Image Generator that produces custom visuals tailored to your brand’s aesthetic. Blaze also offers a Background Remover tool, useful for creating clean product shots of photography equipment or student portfolios. While it lacks deep research capabilities or multi-platform publishing automation, Blaze excels at rapid content ideation and visual asset generation. Schools can use it to quickly produce blog content about ‘10 Essential Camera Lenses for Students’ or generate social media graphics featuring student work with branded overlays. Its team collaboration features make it ideal for small marketing teams or freelance content creators managing multiple school accounts.

Search Atlas is an enterprise SEO and AI-powered content platform focused on helping brands dominate search results through topical authority and LLM visibility. According to their website, its flagship feature, LLM Visibility, helps content rank not just in traditional search engines but also in AI-generated answers from models like ChatGPT and Gemini. For photography schools, this means creating content that not only appears on page one of Google but also gets picked up as the authoritative source in AI summaries. Search Atlas offers Topical Maps to identify content clusters around core themes like ‘Photography Education’ or ‘Digital Darkroom Techniques,’ ensuring comprehensive coverage of relevant subtopics. Its OTTO SEO and OTTO Agent tools automate keyword research, content brief generation, and competitive gap analysis. While it doesn’t generate social media videos, AI avatars, or automate posting, it excels at structuring long-form blog content and optimizing it for semantic search and AI indexing. Photography schools can use Search Atlas to build authoritative, in-depth guides that position them as experts in the field—ideal for attracting organic traffic from students researching programs. The platform is especially valuable for institutions with strong blog strategies looking to capture voice search and AI-driven traffic.