Could a social media marketer or a content creator do their job without access to a social insights tool? Maybe, but fumbling around in the dark with the desperate hope that you stumble upon a gem is a rough way live.

At their heart, these tools help you identify great content wherever it is hiding on the web. They use social media shares to pinpoint what is getting talked about and shared. Armed with this information, you can easily identify what content is working within your niche. You can curate industry-specific articles that has viral legs for your social media following. With some tools, you can even trace back which websites are linking to these resources.

Over the last few years, we have seen no shortage of players enter this market. Twitter-focused Topsy was one of the first to come along in 2007. Last year, Buzzsumo upped the ante with its comprehensive suite of content and influencer search. Recently, Ahrefs entered the fray with their latest Content Explorer tool. I thought it would be a good exercise to run Content Explorer through the paces and see how its features stacked up to the established players.

The meat of each of these tools is their ability to identify popular content. Ahrefs’ Content Explorer does a great job with this. It provides you key information on each article like the title, the website, the date is was posted and a link to see it in the flesh. It even gives you a thumbnail image drawn from the post which is a nice touch. Content Explorer also breaks down social shares by channel. For instance, I did a search on Broadway over the last week, and it is clear that the theatre crowd loves to share on Facebook. In many cases, it was a 50 to 1 difference over the next popular social channel, Twitter.

Since Ahrefs is one of the premier tools for the SEO crowd, it should come as no surprise that they also provide information regarding how many referring domains are linking to the article. I haven’t seen this feature in any of the other social insight tools I’ve used in the past. I can see this being really handy for targeting outreach partners for your own content production.

Content Explorer has all of the filter options you’ve come to expect. You can drill down by date. You can even get as granular as seeing content posted within the last hour. When doing side-by-side search comparisons with Buzzsumo, I was definitely seeing a divide in the results pegged to the same period. I get the feeling that Content Explorer defines this from when the content was originally posted whereas Buzzsumo may look at social shares during the defined time period. For the weekly Broadway search, it was 35 results versus 67 pages of results on Buzzsumo so they are definitely taking divergent approaches. In addition to date, you can also filter by language and domain name.

For those who wanting a greater control over their searches, you can utilize common operators like OR and AND, site: and boolean operators to pinpoint exactly what you are looking for. You can also take it a step further by creating alerts based on your defined search criteria.

The default search sort method within Content Explorer is a little strange. It seems to sort on an element it has defined as median. From what I can see, it pulls that number from one of the social sharing columns with little rhyme or reason as to which one. A few grabbed LinkedIn while others lassoed the Pinterest count. Other median numbers fixated on Twitter and Google Plus. I found myself sorting by the sum to get a more even view across my queries.

Our company has the Lite plan with Ahrefs so that allowed us to see 20 results per search in Content Explorer. When you consider this is a value add feature on a $79/month plan, this is a pretty nice perk. Buzzsumo runs $99/month on their lowest tier Pro plan, and that doesn’t have the top-end SEO tools Ahrefs has.

Overall, Ahrefs’ Content Explorer is a worth competitor to Buzzsumo, Topsy and the other social insight tools on the market. Not to mention, its a very nice addition to Ahrefs’ core software offerings. In future builds, I’d love to see the tool integrate content filtering (infographics, guest blogging, interviews). An influencer search would also be a very handy feature. I’m sure their developers will find another feature or two that we never knew that we’ve always needed.