Social Publishing Index: Summer 2025

Our Social Publishing Index takes a group of 50 publishers and examines their individual and collective performance across all of the big social media platforms, diving into some of the trends that we’re seeing from them.

It’s intentionally a broad but non-exhaustive group, with representation from the New York Times to Vogue to Bleacher Report to LADbible. If you’re interested in comparing directly with the numbers in this report, you can go back and look at our Q1 iteration.

The toplines are below, and you can download the full report at the bottom of the page to get access to platform-specific analysis. 

The toplines

In Q2, we saw some significant shifts in engagement patterns across the platforms.

  • Facebook was the only platform to see a slight uptick in engagement with news content vs. Q1, with engagement rising 6%.
  • TikTok is still the biggest platform for raw engagement with 2.5 billion, but engagement has gone down.
  • A handful of successful publishers are still driving the majority of total engagement.

 

Engagement drops but TikTok still leads

TikTok was the biggest driver of engagement for this group by a distance in Q1, and that remained the case in Q2, with more than 2.4 billion engagements.

That said, there were a couple of noteworthy changes.

First of all, engagement was down by about 23% across all platforms for this group. Despite its relative dominance, it was TikTok that saw the biggest drop in engagement, with a reduction of 31%, compared to a drop of around 16% for its closest peer platform Instagram.

TikTok was still the platform that drove the most engagement by a considerable distance, with 57% of all engagement coming there.

A slightly less dominant top five

In Q1, just five publishers were responsible for almost 58% of the engagement across all platforms from our group of 50. Those same publishers—ESPN, Bleacher Report, Fox News, The Daily Mail, and LADbible—remained the top five, but were less dominant vs. the rest of the pack than they had been previously, driving 51% of the total engagement.

Still, more than half of interactions are coming from just five publishers, and the dip is mostly driven by ESPN and Bleacher Report seeing a drop in engagement on their TikTok channels.

Sports pages are still dunking on everyone else

Engagement for both ESPN and Bleacher Report was down about 40% compared to their peaks last quarter.

ESPN’s TikTok engagement was down 47% for Q2 compared to Q1, while Bleacher Report’s was down 51%. These are both substantial drops, and more than others in the Index saw, with the average drop across the group being closer to 30%.

Download the report

In the report, you’ll discover more about:

  • Facebook’s steady hand for news: Facebook was the one platform that grew in engagement in Q2, mostly driven by Fox News having its highest engagement levels in 8+ years.
  • TikTok’s dip: While TikTok remained the biggest driver of engagement, it did see a big dip in interactions compared to other platforms. 
  • Tactics for platform success: We break down the top publishers on each platform, highlighting what’s working for them in their top posts.