Your new front page: How newsrooms and publishers will win audiences on social in 2025

 

News consumption is changing, and so is how news outlets approach its distribution on social. Recent studies by both Pew and Ofcom have shown that more people than ever get their news straight from social media, and it’s a trend that’s only growing.

It’s no longer about just driving traffic to the website through posting links on Facebook and Twitter. There’s a whole evolving eco-system that publishers are adapting to, building their brands with new audiences and users who might not ever make it to the homepage.

To understand how publishers are navigating this new social landscape, we took 50 of the top outlets from across the different platforms, encompassing news, lifestyle, sports, and politics, and looked at the key trends across that group between January and mid-October this year.

This report will offer insight into and examples of the most successful publishers across web, Facebook, X, Instagram, and TikTok. Where appropriate, we also took examples from outside of those 50, but all of the aggregate numbers focus on the core group.

The toplines

Put simply, Instagram and TikTok have become dominant forces when it comes to social engagement with news publishers. Together they make up more than 80% of the total engagement across the six million posts and articles we looked at for this report.

We’ll dive into the data and details of these findings, but highlights of our research include:

  • Instagram and TikTok driving the majority of engagements across these publishers
  • A group of five publishers that achieved more than five billion engagements across their social channels
  • The success of sports content, with ESPN and Bleacher Report blowing away the competition

Instagram and TikTok dominate

We first looked at how engagement differs by platform for 50 select publishers, as well as their web article engagement.

Where Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) once dominated, Instagram and TikTok now shine, highlighting the shift to a more visual, short-form video style of reporting that has steadily gained success over the past year. 

This ratio does vary for different publishers, and you can explore more on the chart opposite, with The Daily Mail very TikTok forward, The Economist seeing success on X, and Business Insider doing much better on web and Facebook.

 

Engagement by platform for select publishers

Publisher contribution to total engagement

A Pareto principle for publishers

ESPN, Bleacher Report, the Daily Mail, LADbible, and Vogue are responsible for over half the total engagement across these platforms.

These five alone have combined for 5.3 billion engagements across their web and social posts, compared to 4.2 billion for the other 45 publishers on the list. Their common theme is striking visual content that performed well on both TikTok and Instagram, though they did not have much in common when it came to what the successful posts actually entailed.

We’ll explore specific posts from each of these later in the report, but what’s clear from the get-go is how much the public resonated with content about sports, fashion & lifestyle, and feel-good stories.

A sports slam dunk

The scale of that engagement is also reflected in the raw numbers, where both ESPN and Bleacher Report topped 1.5 billion engagements. The Daily Mail was not far behind with 852 million of its own.

While they might look comparatively small compared to the sports giants, the likes of Fox News, BBC News, Al Jazeera and ABC News are still in the top ten, and generating hundreds of millions of engagements.

The driver of huge engagement here is success on the new video platforms, but publishers such as LADbible show there’s still a lot of engagement to be had on Facebook for those with the right content, and that helped propel the viral publisher into third in our list overall.

Top publishers across all platforms

Read the full report

That’s it for the preview of our 2025 social publishing guide.

Fill in the form to read the full analysis, which contains a deep-dive analysis of every platform and the key drivers of engagement on Facebook, X, TikTok, and Instagram.Â