Despite seeing a modest drop in engagement in Q3 for the Social Publishing Index publishers, the platform still remained the biggest platform, with engagement for this group of publishers topping 2 billion interactions.
Here are some of the key takeaways from TikTok news content in Q3:
- The Daily Mail took the crown as the SPI’s top publisher on TikTok
- BBC News saw the biggest surge in raw interaction numbers, with an increase of 61,000,000 engagements (75%)
- In many ways, the viral video formula that has worked for years hasn’t actually changed that much, it’s just happening on a different platform
The Daily Mail displaces ESPN to reign supreme
The Daily Mail has always been a contender for the lead in our analyses, and this time it clinched the top spot thanks to a steady 13% rise in engagement with its short-form video content, alongside ESPN’s precipitous drop of 47% in engagement with its content.
The Daily Mail touched 400 million engagements on the platform for the first time in a quarter, meaning some 93% of the publisher’s interactions happened on TikTok, with the other 7% spread reasonably evenly among the rest.
But what actually worked for the publisher?
Its top posts generally had no common theme that tied them together, and ran the gamut from the death of a famous Connecticut judge to a Russian missile attack on Ukraine.
@dailymail Frank Caprio, a renowned judge turned internet sensation, has died at the age of 88. Caprio’s passing was confirmed on Wednesday by his son, Frank T. Caprio. Elected as a judge in 1985, Caprio rose to national fame through his television series Caught in Providence, which earned a Daytime Emmy nomination in 2021. The show gained widespread popularity on social media, with numerous clips going viral - particularly those featuring Caprio compassionately dismissing tickets after hearing the heartfelt stories of those who appeared before him. This is a developing story. Follow Daily Mail for updates. #news #breakingnews #judge #frankcaprio ♬ snowfall - Øneheart & reidenshi
@dailymail Russia battered Kyiv with missiles and drones in an all-night attack just hours after US President Donald Trump admitted he made no headway with Vladimir Putin in a call between the two presidents yesterday. According to Ukraine’s Air Force, they say the air raid alerts lasted more than eight hours with several waves of attacks. Read the full story on DailyMail.com
♬ original sound - Daily Mail
An analysis of the hashtags used in the top 1,000 posts can then give us a clue as to what worked on a grander scale. The publisher tended to employ an average of 4 hashtags per post for its top performing content, though this was sometimes as many as 9 or as few as 0.
The top 1,000 posts incorporated 4,065 hashtags in total, and of these, the most used were #news (used 712 times), #trump, #politics, #usa, and #crime. The majority of these are emotive topics, primed to drive engagement and emotion, and the focus on international news, particularly in the US, is clearly working for the UK publisher.
BBC News’s rising profile
While The Daily Mail has been dominant in this area for some time, another British publication appears to be beginning to rival it, with BBC News seeing a striking 75% increase in interactions this quarter.
Looking at its content, again there was no central theme to the top posts, but what did tie them together was brevity. None of the publisher’s top ten videos were over a minute long, and most of them were under 30 seconds (with the shortest clocking in at just ten seconds.)
The publisher was much more liberal in its use of hashtags than The Mail, averaging around eight per post among its top 1,000 posts. Almost every post was tagged with the #bbcnews hashtag, but beyond that the most used were #news, #donaldtrump, #uk, and #us, showing that even for the most British of publishers, the US remains fertile ground as a source of news and engagement.
Viral videos still win
“Never work with children or animals”, or so the old adage goes. That might hold true for WC Fields in the 40s, but if you’re after a viral video hit, it’s precisely the wrong advice. The truth is, while TikTok is undoubtedly its own ecosystem with its own algorithm and emotional drivers, the formula for a good old-fashioned viral video does not seem to have changed that much since the halcyon Facebook days.
The top two videos from the SPI this quarter both came from ABC News, and both feature animal rescues, though of two different kinds.
The top video features an animal being rescued, with footage of two men in India pulling a monkey from a river topping 12 million engagements. The other featured a role reversal as a dog rescuing itself during a house fire in Illinois.
@abcnews Two men in India sprang into action when they spotted a stranded monkey in a rushing river. #india #monkey ♬ original sound - ABC News
@abcnews A dog helped assist in its own rescue after an Illinois family's home caught fire last week. Bodycam footage shows police entering a smoke-filled home to save the family pet — with the dog leading the officer to its leash before being led out the door. No one was inside the home at the time of the fire besides the dog, according to police. #dog #animal #police #news #abcnews ♬ original sound - ABC News
These are videos that could easily have come from the viral video era of the late teens, and show that in the age of face-to-camera explainers and hot takes, there’s still room for a good old animal video to drive engagement on TikTok.
Post a lot on TikTok, it matters!
Unlike some other platforms we have looked at for this analysis, TikTok is one where there really does appear to be a strong correlation between posting a lot and seeing high engagement.
Whereas on other networks there was often minimal relationship between posting a lot and building community, there’s clearly something about TikTok that plays well with regular posting, as there’s almost a direct line between the amount of posts and the amount of engagement, with the Daily Mail an outlier in terms of performance.
For more insights from our Social Publishing Index, read our topline analysis, which also links to every different platform.
