Facebook engagement has exploded for news publishers in 2025

In January, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would be going back to its roots with some changes coming to the platform. Whatever those changes ended up being, it seems to have had a big effect on engagement levels for news publishers on the platform. 

Every quarter, we publish a study of a group of 50 publishers across different social platforms to get a sense of the shifting sands of social media. In our report looking back at Q1, while TikTok was the main driver of engagement for the group, one undeniable takeaway from the study is that Facebook engagement has come roaring back. 

Engagement was up 200% in Q1 2025 vs. Q1 2024 for this group of publishers, and it’s obvious that this was not just driven by an increase in posting levels, as that has remained constant. In the chart below, the line graph represents engagement levels and the bars represent posts per week, as visualized by our new Timeline feature.

Weekly engagement has tripled since twelve months ago, and while there was a rising trendline through the back half of 2024, the real acceleration began in February. 

That becomes more obvious when you look at 2025 so far compared to the same period in 2024, which you can also visualize using Timeline.

The extent of this success becomes obvious when we compare it to the same period in 2024, with engagement approaching 9x the levels Fox achieved last year. While the publisher has seen rises in other platforms (106% on its web articles, 161% on X, and 67% on Instagram) the Facebook rise has blown all of the others out the water.

In fact, it’s worth noting that Fox’s total engagement of 176 million engagements through May 6th of this year is already two times higher than its total engagement for the whole of 2024, which totaled just under 88 million. 

So what’s driving this success? Is it just a Trump bump? Maybe in part, and the publisher’s most successful posts are certainly focused on politics as the chart below shows, but the outsized rise in Facebook engagement compared to other platforms does hint that it goes deeper than that, with a potential feedback loop being created through an engaged audience that is seeking out this kind of news on the platform. 

Fox not alone in Facebook engagement jump

Fox’s success isn’t what’s driven the whole of the rise for the group we studied, and many mainstream publishers have seen rises in engagement above the mean, including huge publishers such as the New York Times, CNN, and ABC News. 

To take one of the above, the New York Times has seen a 3.5x increase in its own engagement compared to 2024.

The top posts from the New York Times were much broader than those that saw success for Fox News, with everything from the Hollywood fires to an earthquake to Kendrick Lanar’s Super Bowl performance getting attention from the publisher’s audience.

What was a common theme between the two American giants was photos. The top posts were almost all photos for both publishers.

However, it’s not all politics, and it’s not all photos, and to underline that point, we can turn to The Metro. Despite some political engagement the majority of the top posts that helped drive its 378% increase in engagement were the kind of viral videos you might have seen on Facebook in its original video era. Highlights included everything from surprise Christmas gifts to children golfing, but children and animals were a big focus of the publisher’s top posts.

Nat Geo and ESPN buck the rising engagement trend

Just as some publishers outperform the mean increase, inevitably some have to underperform it, and a rising tide did not lift all boats. 

National Geographic and ESPN, which have seen success on Instagram and TikTok in recent years, did not see the same level of engagement increase that some of their peers saw.

National Geographic has seen a 10% rise in engagement, while ESPN has achieved 7% this year. 

So while there may be changes afoot at Facebook, it does appear that news publishers are reaping the benefits more than some others, with the likes of Fox News, CNN, ABC News, and The New York Times all seeing orders of magnitude more engagement than they had been in recent years. 

Social traffic is always a challenge and can be ephemeral, but it looks to be time to make hay while the sun shines in terms of engagement on the platform, with photo posts linking out to articles clearly driving a lot of attention right now. 

To read our full Social Publisher Index report, go here.