The Biggest Facebook Video Publishers in June

For the first time, we rank the top 20 Facebook video producers by page, based on total shares of their clips in June. 
We already know that video is a big deal on Facebook.
When we recently looked at the performance of Facebook native video, we found that for some publishers, videos get much higher levels of average engagement than other types of posts, such as images and external links. In the case of the BBC News page, videos were getting an average of four times the number of shares as links to the BBC website.
As of May, native videos make up around 30% of the average news feed.
This time, we used NewsWhip’s Insights platform to take a closer look at the performance of Facebook video by different pages.
There are a number of ways to rank the list of ‘top Facebook video publishers’. They could be ranked by total engagements, total output, or total views. For simplicity, we ranked these pages by shares of videos posted by each page in June. When returning to Facebook video in future, we may consider looking at other key metrics.
These were the top 20 English language Facebook pages for video, based on total shares of video posts:

Note: These figures are based on the Facebook pages currently in the NewsWhip database. You can add any Facebook page to our database in Spike. Data is as of June 30th, without having been rescored. 
Last time we ranked Facebook videos, we did so by total Likes, and saw that celebrity pages dominated:

Looking at shares this time, informative and funny videos dominate. We already know that different types of content attract different interactions on Facebook, and this survey seems to extend those findings to video.
For many of these pages, their inclusion in the top 20 was down to some remarkably well-shared videos. At the very top, the BuzzFeed Food page picked up an impressive 6.6 million shares of their videos alone, indicating huge interest in their subject matter.
The BuzzFeed Food page is a good example of what a successful distributed content model looks like. The videos are crafted very carefully. They’re usually short, very visual, and can be fully understood without being heard (a tactic that more and more video producers seem to be subscribing to). Some of the videos attract staggering levels of engagement, largely in the form of comments.
Their most popular video in June was 15 seconds long, was shared over 2.1 million times, watched more than 80 million times, and looks as though it was probably shot on an iPhone.

Remember that these figures are for videos posted in June only. For pages like BuzzFeed Food, content tends to have an extremely evergreen flavour – meaning that their total engagements for the month are likely to be far higher.
It’s interesting to see the array of different names on the list. Some are simply collections of videos from other sources, such as ‘The Best of Tumblr’, and ‘Best Vines’. Jimmy Fallon’s Facebook page is the closest thing to what could be considered a ‘legacy media’ entry.
For news publishers, video specialists NowThis and the millennial-focused AJ+ are doing very well.
NowThis’s most popular video had more than 21.5 million views, and was shared over 425,000 times. In a Q&A on our blog earlier this year, NowThis’s Head of Social, Ashish Patel said of their Facebook strategy:
“We see that people use it for different purposes. That helps us segment our content into different categories. So for Facebook, we tend to see more success around more cause-driven or emotionally pulling content.”
Interestingly, each of AJ+’s videos end with a suggestion that the viewer ‘share this video’. Seems like a simple ploy, but one that appears to be working pretty well for their page.

It’s important to remember that engagements like likes, shares and comments aren’t the only expression of interest that Facebook will take in videos. This week, they announced that turning up the volume on the muted clips, and going full-screen, would count as ways for the algorithm to remember whether or not to show you more clips from that source in the future.
Video will remain a powerful way for publishers to reach audiences in future. We expect to see engagement with these clips grow continue to grow in Spike, where they already see huge levels of engagement each day.

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