We recently looked at a cross-section of ten UK publishers across various social platforms. Today, we’re going to look at ten more publishers across the same platforms.
This time, we’ll be focusing on LADbible, UNILAD, the Financial Times, The Sun, The Independent, The Daily Mirror, The Telegraph, The Times, The Standard, and The Daily Star.
So what can we learn from this set of publishers?
LADbible’s cross-platform dominance outshines the competition
Well, there’s one clear standout, and that’s LADbible, who dominated across Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, amassing almost 800 million interactions across the three platforms.
What’s most notable about LADbible’s success is that it was so consistent. The publisher saw almost the same amount of engagement on each of the three platforms, with around 225 million interactions on its content every time.
That’s a remarkable level of consistency, and it’s even more remarkable given the way we have seen TikTok and Instagram outperform Facebook for almost every other publisher we’ve looked at, with TikTok in particular often driving multiple times the engagement levels.
Let’s dig into what drives success on each platform, and how much engagement these publishers are getting.
Facebook publishers led by LADbible’s relatable content
LADbible’s 225 million engagements on Facebook was more than double its nearest competitor UNILAD, which itself had 102 million engagements.
None of the other publishers we looked at were in the same order of magnitude as these two giants of Facebook publishing, though the Daily Mirror was the closest with 20 million engagements with its content.
LADbible has consistently been among the top publishers on Facebook worldwide, so it’s no surprise to see it well ahead of its UK peers here.
We wrote in our previous analysis about the patterns of a successful Facebook post, and they hold true for LADbible. Content featuring children and animals has always been a winner on Facebook, and that is exemplified by the publisher’s top posts.
The example above of a baby copying his flexing father was the most engaging of the last year, with almost 1.5 million engagements. Across this set of publishers, LADbible had nine of the top ten posts, with UNILAD’s post featuring a young guitarist the only one to disrupt its monopoly. All ten of the top posts were videos, often using Facebook Watch, which highlights the format’s continued success on the platform.
Humor in the spotlight on Instagram
Although LADbible’s Facebook Page was on aggregate more successful than its Instagram by a million or so, it was still far ahead of the competition on Instagram — perhaps even more dramatically so than on Facebook. UNILAD had 54 million engagements, while the Financial Times had just over 12 million.
The top content from LADbible was not dissimilar to what we saw on Facebook from the publisher, with humor and cute content winning engagement. The top two posts featured a woman going down a slide and the post below about an impressive way to share a kebab.
Again, LADbible dominated the top ten posts, with nine of the top ten. On Instagram its duopoly was broken by The Independent, whose post about a young boy with a rare condition sharing the news that he would receive a heart transplant resonated with more than a million engagements.
Though Instagram is normally more of a photo-forward platform, video once again dominated among the top posts, with the only photo in the top ten being an image paying tribute to a chef thought to be the inventor of tiramisu.
Other publishers close the gap on TikTok
While LADbible was still out in front of its peers, TikTok was less of a blowout in terms of engagement. The Sun and The Daily Mirror were both high performers on the platform, alongside the usual suspects of UNILAD and LADbible.
LADbible’s 228 million engagements puts it ahead of every publisher we have looked at across our two analyses other than the Daily Mail, whose sheer scale of engagement we looked at in closer detail previously.
Though LADbible’s aggregate engagement was about the same as it was on Facebook and Instagram, that’s partly a function of posting less on the platform, as individual posts had much higher engagement. Where the top posts hovered around 1.5 million engagements on the latter two, the top post on TikTok had more than 6 million engagements.
The Sun and The Daily Mirror were both high performers on the platform too, driving millions of engagements. Their top posts focused on pandas at the zoo that were actually dogs, and strange noises heard by astronauts from the Boeing starliner. The top post from UNILAD, which again broke LADbible’s monopoly, showcased young students doing math impressively fast in their heads.
Traditional media bounces back with web content
Web content was the one area where LADbible wasn’t the obvious leader among this field, with the Daily Mirror and The Sun coming out ahead of the competition here.
The Daily Mirror has a long tradition of seeing its web links perform well, frequently appearing in the top five of our publisher rankings, so it’s little surprise to see that engagement is still going strong. Soccer content was a dominant force in driving engagement, as were stories such as the potential return of Woolworths to the UK and Alan Bates being knighted.
Engagement has been falling for web links for the last few years, but it’s clear there is still an audience out there for the right topics.
If it’s a visual platform, look for LADbible
What we’ve learned through this analysis is just how dominant LADbible is on these visual platforms, from its legacy success on Facebook to new frontiers such as Instagram and TikTok. TikTok was the platform where it faced the most competition driving around 50% of the total engagement on the platform among the publishers we looked at compared to 73% on Instagram and 60% on Facebook.
What’s interesting though is that it’s different content that succeeds on each platform, with the top posts not being the same on any of them, even if they did share similarities.
For more on cross-platform trends, read our 50-publisher report analyzing content from 2024 and predicting what’s to come in 2025.
