We’re back with the big Facebook publishers of last month, with a detailed breakdown of the interactions that the top 25 publishers received in May.
First, here are the top 10 Facebook publishers of May, ranked by total shares of articles published that month:
The big surprise this month is at the very top of the table. For the first time since November 2013, the Huffington Post are back on top of the Facebook charts.
The Huff Po achieved their highest number of total interactions in a long time, breaking the 30m total interactions mark.
Their most popular stories last month included a piece on gluten free diets ( 480,000+ interactions), a piece titled ‘This Woman Wants To Change How All Of Us See Our Bodies‘ (455,000+ interactions), and a blog on parenting (430,000 interactions).
Interestingly, much of the Huffington Post’s most popular pieces seem to be long form opinion pieces. They do have very popular viral videos too, but for the most part, interesting blogs with socially optimised headlines seem to be the big successes.
It’s been a gradual comedown for BuzzFeed, who finally seem to have the sheen of their interactive quizzes wear off. For the first time in months, the list of their biggest Facebook stories of the month was not dominated by quiz titles. They’re still a potent social force, and we expect their Facebook interactions to start stabilising very shortly.
Meanwhile, the Guardian continue to climb steadily. In the early months of 2014, it was the Daily Mail who usually led the charge by traditional newspapers online – not so last month. The Guardian placed at number 6 overall in May with their best Facebook performance since we started publishing these stats.
For the likes of the Guardian, the value of social distribution is now surely obvious. Having 8m+ interactions with new stories in a single month by people who might never have previously visited the site is nothing to be scoffed at. We await plans by similar publishers to capitalise on this attention with interest.
Another notable ascender in the top 25 is Philippine site ABS-CBN, who come in very highly at number 7 overall.
With the recent launch of Spike’s South East Asian section, we added the English language site to our database, and quickly noticed the site’s content rising rapidly through to the top of the most shared content in that region.
ABS-CBN publishes in English and its high ranking may be attributed to the publisher’s 4.6m Facebook fans. There is significant Facebook activity in the country – a quick look at Spike’s publisher view confirms that they have plenty of social engagement.
Check out the top 25 publishers and their stats below. We’ll be back with May’s biggest Twitter publishers and more social data insights on the blog soon, so don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter for updates.
Questions? Comments? Requests? Let us know in the comments below, or on Twitter @NewsWhip.
How do we know all this stuff?
We compiled our data using Spike, which tracks the content that people are sharing and engaging with in real time. It’s used by some of the world’s leading digital newsrooms, and there’s a free trial for new users.
NB: Due to a significant Facebook score glitch, we are unable to provide figures for ABC this month.
NewsWhip gathers its data from Spike, our professional platform that monitors the social distribution of news. While we strive for complete coverage, sometimes we will miss some content for some publishers. If it looks to you like we’re missing something or have our numbers wrong, drop us a line.
