Following on from our rankings of the biggest Facebook publishers of October, we took a closer look at our data to try and figure out what a breakdown of top publishers’ Facebook engagements looks like.
Every month, we publish two rankings in our Facebook publisher charts: the top ten by shares only, and the top 25 by total Facebook interactions (likes, comments and shares).
And every month, some sites that appear in the top of the total interactions chart don’t appear in the 10 most shared, and vice versa. That’s because the breakdown of their interactions vary. Some sites get a higher proportion of Likes, while other publishers are better at attracting comments.
For practically all sites, the ‘Like’ is the easiest engagement to achieve. There are a heap of ways that someone can like your story. They might see a friend posting a story, and like that. They might like it because they already like the site’s page and it shows up in their feed. Or perhaps it causes them to stop scrolling because Edge Rank decides that it’s something they might be interested in, based on their friends’ recommendations. And on many sites, they can use on-site plugins to Like, too.
A share can be a bit toucher to achieve. It require more effort from the reader, but is possibly a better indicator of engagement. Someone’s more likely to share something that they care about, and they find worth posting to their friends.
Here’s a snapshot of how eight different sites do when their October interactions are divvied up. We selected these sites as examples from our top 25, rather than strictly ranking sites based on ratios. Again, all this data come from our social discovery platform, Spike.
The above chart shows us a few things. It suggests that a lot of Bleacher Report’s Facebook engagement happens on the network itself. That does seem to stand up. A quick look at their Facebook page indicates good engagement with all stories posted. In October, here were Bleacher Report’s most-liked stories. (sidenote: Bleacher Report’s WWE coverage does really well on Facebook).
Look at the colossal number of likes, compared to shares and comments (click to enlarge):
Most social media editors will likely be looking at how best to engage their fans on Facebook. Likes are often what propels stories into the news feeds of other readers, helping attract new readers to stories all the time. Getting a good ‘Like’ rate is useful in building new audiences and attracting social subscribers.
The chart above also shows us the impressive interaction balance achieved by PlayBuzz. They are one of the few publishers that manage to attract more shares than likes. Not all their interactions are coming from Likes and Shares – it looks like their followers are commenting on the results of the quizzes too.
The BBC also perform well, with the second highest proportion of shares of the eight.
The relationship between share button positioning and these figures is an intriguing area – do sites that visually prompt readers to share have a higher share proportion? It’s hard to say.
For now, here are the top 25 sites of last month, with their interaction breakdowns. To see how each site did overall, see our Facebook rankings from earlier this month.
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We compiled our data using Spike, which tracks the content that people are sharing and engaging with in real time. It’s used by some of the world’s leading digital newsrooms and content creators. It now features a one month view to show the biggest stories of the last 30 days – there’s a free trial for new users.
Note: We do count comments on sites that have the Facebook social plugin enabled, like BuzzFeed and Vice. However, the data shows that on-site commenting is negligible compared to commenting on Facebook itself, so this shouldn’t have too much of an effect on the findings.
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