Another month, another list of the most popular stories on the social web. We’ve ransacked our logs for the sharing data of countless stories published around the world during September, and our analysis show the real winners in the battle for share-grabbing content.
As NewsWhip showed last month, a two-tier system quickly emerges around the sharing patterns of different stories. The share life of listicles, once-off content and especially hilarious articles can reach well past their publication date, while news, comment and other time-sensitive material usually has to make do with being popular for a day or two. While the top of the sharing chart is almost always dominated by inspiring content with catchy headlines and no expiry date, the story of the month’s events is found further down the list.
Inspirational videos go viral with ease
With this in mind, Facebook’s most popular article during September was a Gawker re-post of the ‘inspirational advertising’ of Thai telecommunications firm True.
The article, ‘This Three Minute Commercial Puts Full-Length Hollywood Films to Shame’ was a perfectly primed piece of viral content – promising readers something unique, while assuring them of its brevity.
Similarly, the second most popular Facebook article was Upworthy’s ‘A Boy Makes Anti-Muslim Comments in Front of an American Soldier…’ – quintessential Upworthy output.
In interviews, the site’s co-founders Eli Pariser and Peter Koechley have said that some of their viral success has been thanks to targeting of specific social media influencers. This strategy, coupled with tested, clickable headlines, seem to drive the majority of clicks, but it also looks clear that optimistically themed, feel-good content really gets audiences sharing.
Other viral stories that did well in September include Kelly MacClean’s description of her trip to American supermarket chain Whole Foods on the Huffington Post, and The Onion’s poker-faced assertion that a majority of Americans approved of sending Congress to Syria. With the exception of The Onion piece, which cleverly captured national sentiment amidst a current news event, all these stories have long share lives and continue to be clicked, commented on and passed around. It’s worth noting however that Gawker’s story did particularly well last month – August’s top-shared piece gathered about 350,000 less likes.
Putin and the Pope make the news
In terms of current events in September, we have to go a long way down the list to see what engaged people during the month, but Vladimir Putin’s address to the American people, by way of New York Times op-ed, was big enough to become a news event in its own right.
The piece was liked by over 225,000 people on Facebook during September, and shared 141,000 times. It was also by far the most popular news item on Twitter during the month, with over 33,000 tweets. It seems as though the unusual appearance of a commentary piece in America’s biggest newspaper by an internationally recognisable figure such as Putin (even if he seemed to have had some help), at a time when Syria dominated the news agenda, attracted the curiosity of enough people to muscle its final sharing position for September into number ten in the list of September’s most shared on Facebook.
A number of reformative comments made by Pope Francis during September also made for highly popular news on social media. On September 11, the London Independent’s report of the Pope’s view that atheists ‘don’t need to believe in God to get to heaven’ was shared and commented extensively.
However, it was the contents of an interview later in the month that proved globally newsworthy. The New York Times’ report of the Pope’s declaration that the Catholic Church had grown ‘obsessed’ with homosexuality, contraception and abortion amassed almost 50,000 Facebook comments and was liked over 125,000 times.
Other big news events on social media during the month included the Navy Yard shooting in Washington, the death of kidnapper Ariel Castro and a CNN story on 2013 being the worst year for measles in America in over a decade.
To finish, the one story that got Facebook chattering more than anything else in September was the Huffington Post’s stab at explaining why Generation Y are so unhappy, all the time. Published halfway through the month, the story attracted over 302,000 comments on Facebook by midnight on September 30th.
Perhaps all that comment section introspection lends some credence to the professor who opined in the piece that members of Generation Y tend to have very “inflated views of themselves”.
All of the data for this research came from Spike, NewsWhip’s pro content discovery tool. Spike tracks the social spread of over 200,000 stories each day, allowing users to find the stories that are getting shares, likes, tweets and other interaction, often early in their viral growth.
