BuzzGrowl: A premium answer to driving on-site social media engagement

If you’re a smart website owner, you’re paying attention to what discussions are surrounding your properties. At a bare minimum, you want to have share buttons and you want to see how they’re used. While some services such as Addthis and Tweetmeme provide analytics, that interaction with your site can always be taken a step further. Imagine if people reading your site could see tweets or Facebook discussions that are related to it right on the page.

With BuzzGrowl, they can, and the control that you’re afforded is second to none.

BuzzGrowl has been around for a bit as a Chrome extension and free service. The extension is a good preview of what it can do for you. By showing, in a stylized box on your website, the conversation that is going on about your website, the goal is to drive engagement. It’s an age-old idea. People don’t like to be the first to speak up, so if you show them that they’re not, they’re more likely to join in the talk.

Today, BuzzGrowl is taking its business a step further with BuzzGrowl for Publishers. Unlike the free version, which simply displays the conversation around your site, the Publishers version of BuzzGrowl allows you to highly customize what activity shows to your readers.

To start, BuzzGrowl will take on the style of your website so that it looks as integrated as possible. But the true power is in the fact that publishers can set the display of posts by a number of factors. Date, influencer rating and positive sentiment can all come into play, the last two of which are proprietary technology from BuzzGrowl.

In a single click, users can Tweet, Retweet or post your content to Facebook without ever having to leave your site. Not only should that increase time spent viewing your content, it should also increase engagement and traffic from the networks that are being tapped. Oh, and the fact that BuzzGrowl can display tweets from people that a reader isn’t even following allows for easy discussion and retweeting, again without having to leave the site.

We’ve given BuzzGrowl a spin and we were pretty impressed by the potential that it has. The Chrome extension gave some impressive results, but we wanted to see only tweets that were related to the specific story that we were reading. The BuzzGrowl team is working on that, as we speak.

The free, site-hosted version is a simple paste-one-line installation. If you run a small blog, you’ll love it. If you want more power over the content, you’ll want to look at the Publishers version.

BuzzGrowl for Publishers will run you $28 per month. But there’s a free trial to see if you’ll like the service and what it can provide. From what we’ve seen, it’s a potential hit. Anything that can drive traffic to your site and increase conversation is worthy of a look. When you have a fully customizable platform and you’re able to groom the way that discussion happens, that’s a powerful tool that only BuzzGrowl provides.