With organic sharing more important than ever, we look at which sports authors are getting the most buzz on their content across Facebook.Â
Facebook has stepped up their game for being ‘the platform’ that sports fans go to comment on their favorite teams, games, and moments. There are live sports streams, stats and score updates, and more. With so many zealous fans active on Facebook, how do sports publishers and reporters fare with their content there?
We’re often asked about influencers and which content creators are seeing the most engagement on social media. This in mind, last month we looked at which authors created the top engaging Rio Olympics content across Facebook.
This time, we’ve broadened our scope to the entire sports category in NewsWhip Spike. Which authors saw the biggest wins on Facebook for August?
Top Sports Authors of August: Total Engagements
We took a look at the individual authors (as opposed to those unattributed or attributed generally) driving the most likes/reactions, shares, and comments for their content.
Samuel Luckhurst, of Manchester Evening News, saw by far the most Facebook engagements on his content in August, followed by Rob Dawson, also of Manchester Evening News.
They both produced the most articles as well. Luckhurst posted 123 articles, compared to an average of 34 articles for the top ten authors. Goal.com had the most authors on the top ten list, followed by Manchester Evening News with three authors.
Content by the Top Authors
What were the top articles from these authors? As we can expect from their respective publications, their winning stories were about soccer.
It would see soccer hooligans are some of the most engaged and devoted on social media, and Manchester United fans especially, as that.
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This story from Samuel Luckhurst around a Manchester United transfer, saw over 42,000 Facebook engagements. With his average engagements per post being 15,000, it’s clear that he’s built up a strong audience.
This is key as Facebook continues to focus on organic sharing in the news feed. It’s more important than ever for publishers to build up communities around their authors, the way Odyssey and INSIDER are doing.
Many of Samuel Luckhearst’s top engaging articles had videos associated with them, before the text. As Facebook favors video more and more, publishers are creating video for more of their own content.
Highest Average Engagements Per Article
If we look at average Facebook engagements per post, these authors change significantly.
There is a wide breadth of publications here. None of our authors or publishers from the total rankings reappear here. There’s a great deal of digital natives, such as Mashable, BuzzFeed, and the Dodo.
Most of these authors only have one-hit wonders that rocketed them to the highest amount of engagements per article. Lindy West of the Guardian, Matt Stopera of BuzzFeed, and Elise Cooper of Mashable, are the only three that had multiple sports articles in our data.
Top Articles of August
The one-hit wonders of these rankings figured heavily into the top ten sports stories of August.
What made these articles such a success in August? Current events that applied to more people than just die-hard sports fans, dominated the list. Eight of these articles are related to the 2016 Rio Summer Olympics.
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The Olympic games are such a big event, watched around the world. It makes sense that these articles, focusing on wins, success stories, and record-breaking athletes, were the buzziest on Facebook.
The remainder of the top ten were about issues of race and gender discrimination, and how they overlapped with sports and famous athletes.
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These are issues already being discussed across social media. The stories that show even sports and athletes deal with these problems, can quickly drive engagement.
Play Ball
Organic sharing on social is only going to grow as more platforms adopt algorithmic approaches to displaying content. Publishers can build up communities around their reporters to help get content distributed to a wider, loyal audience, much like fanatic sports fans.
As there have been famous sports broadcasters who became influencers in their own right, there will be, and already are, the same on social media.
How can you find these influencers? NewsWhip Spike is handy for finding the top authors by region, topic, and across custom timeframes.
A look at the top sports authors in Spike of the past 24 hours reveals which authors are seeing the most engagements and for which stories.Â
The reporters who are savvy to their audiences’ needs and keep them up to date with quality content, will be the ones to succeed.
