Q3 2022

As usual, we must caveat this somewhat by noting that some of these are in subsidiaries for the big cable publishers. This means that NBC contains local news stations under its umbrella, as does Fox News. 

The Mail was the only publication to receive more than 100 million engagements on the platform during the three-month period, with Nigeria’s Legit coming in second with 80 million engagements. NBC’s umbrella grabbed third place with 73 million, and nothing else managed more than 60 million engagements on the platform. 

The continued success of British publishers on Facebook is notable, as is the relatively recent success of African publications, with two Nigerian and one Kenyan publisher making it into the top ten.

The BBC’s coverage of the queen’s death was the only article to get anywhere near a million engagements, which is a significant number in 2022. 

Politics made up a good portion of the top 10 articles, with economic stories and articles about gas prices also featuring. 

The death of Olivia Newton-John was also a major talking point for the quarter, with TMZ’s reporting on the star’s death being the fifth most engaged story of the three-month period.

This has not been the case for a number of quarters, but Q3 2022 once again saw that type of human interest piece coming out on top. 

Sport also had a resurgence on the platform, mostly driven by the Premier League’s transfer season, and several high-profile deals being done as the window ended. 

Deaths — including those of Coolio, Olivia Newton-John, Queen Elizabeth II, and James Caan — were responsible for 15% of the top stories, while politics made up a fairly meager 10 percent.

The top five pages were all sports pages, with soccer being particularly dominant. All five of the pages are devoted specifically to the beautiful game, with no other specialized sports page making it into the top 15. 

Politics was a close second in terms of the top publishers, with Occupy Democrats and The Other 98 Percent both featuring prominently in the list. 

More than two thirds of the top Pages contain publishers, so in this report we will not be highlighting the top publishers specifically as it would be duplicate content. 

What is interesting about publisher success though is that it means influencers and meme accounts are performing less well in terms of engagement than they have been in the recent past.

This is the first time we are delineating gallery posts and differentiating them from photo posts more broadly, but as is obvious from the chart, image content is by far the most successful on the platform, with some 55 percent of the top 10,000 posts being photos of one form or another. 

Native video continues to perform well but was capped at around 40 percent of the top posts in Q3, a relative underperformance from where it has found itself in previous quarters. 

What is notable is that links are still underperforming relative to past quarters too. Where before we have seen links make up seven or eight percent of the top posts, in Q3 2022 they were responsible for only around 2.5 percent of the 10,000 most engaged posts.