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.

We have seven sections to look at, looking individually at each platform, which you can navigate by clicking the tabs below.

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%.

Web publishers on social media

Content on the web saw a slight decline in Q2, though minimal compared to others, and this followed a large increase in Q1.

Here are some of the key takeaways for this quarter on the web:

  • Fox News has the highest engagement of the SPI group, with 42 million engagements.
  • Most of Fox’s top content was political in nature.
  • The top 1,000 articles on the web were a mix of politics news, celebrity deaths, and international news.

Hard news links grabbed online attention

Traditional news outlets dominated the top web links that were shared on Facebook and X, with Fox News the runaway success.

All of the top ten were focused on news and politics from around the world, with no representation for sports or lifestyle publications.

Top articles revolve around celebrity deaths

While many of the top 1,000 articles focused on politics, celebrities actually dominated the very top of the charts for most engaging articles, particularly celebrity deaths and obituaries.

This is a long-term trend that we’ve seen, as people rush to share news and memories of beloved actors and celebrities, with this summer's version including the deaths of Brian Wilson and Val Kilmer.

Fox News and The Daily Mail are outliers in engagement per article

We’re introducing the below graphs in this analysis to examine the extent to which output correlates with engagement across platforms, and it varies considerably.

To do this, we take the engagement levels as a percentage of the highest engagement level on a given platform (here that’s Fox News), and plot them against the number of articles/posts published as a percentage of the publication with the highest levels of output (here that’s the Daily Mail).

On the web, there is some relationship between posting volume and engagement with those posts. There were a few clear outliers, but generally it had the second strongest correlation after TikTok, with a Pearson’s rank correlation coefficient of  around 0.5.

That said, the interesting story is on the margins of that correlation, with Fox News and The Daily Mail the clear trend breakers. The Daily Mail publishes a lot, the most of any of the publishers that we looked at, but finds itself 16th in terms of engagement with those articles, and less than 20% of the level of engagement that Fox News saw.

Politics drives most of the public’s interest

We took the top 1,000 articles and ran an analysis to look at what the top themes were. As you might expect given the nature of the top publishers, this ended up being very politically driven.

Roughly half of the top articles were explicitly focused on US domestic politics, primarily President Donald Trump. That's not including legal and immigration news, which occurred frequently enough to be recognized as their own category. There were 25 stories about SCOTUS and other legal decisions, and just under 100 about immigration amid ongoing raids and anti-ICE activity.

That still leaves a good number of articles to make up the gap, and those were primarily driven by celebrities and cultural moments, which accounted for around 300 of the top stories. The biggest subset of this was celebrity deaths, alongside things like Juneteenth and Easter celebrations.

The remainder focused primarily on international conflicts, including Gaza, Israel, Iran, and Ukraine.

If you want to read our full analysis of the top 1,000 articles, we dug in further over on the blog.

Facebook

Facebook was the only platform to actually see a slight increase in news engagement this quarter, rising 6% when all of the others fell.

Here are some of the key takeaways:

  • Fox News dominated Facebook, with more than 3x the engagement levels of its nearest rivals.
  • Native video made a comeback, accounting for 43% of the top 1,000 posts.
  • Increased posting levels only have a mild correlation with higher engagement levels.

Let’s look a little deeper.

Fox News stays on top on Facebook

Fox News marked another quarter at the top, earning 177 million engagements and far outpacing every other publisher on Facebook. This continued dominance represents an increase of 54% compared to its Q1 total.

ABC climbed into the second spot, followed by LADbible, who saw a drop in engagement to 33.1 million engagements despite placing third.

Newcomers to the top 10 list this quarter include CBS News, CNN, and Reuters, all pushing past Metro. The reshuffling highlights a fluctuating news cycle, with mainstream publishers regaining ground and diversifying the leaderboard.

Fox News rules the top ten

Fox proved that its strategy of consistently writing about politics and culture war topics is paying off with high audience engagement. This was borne out by the publisher being responsible for six of the top 10 posts, with the biggest being about one of Trump’s executive orders.

Standout posts celebrated Elon Musk and Melania Trump’s birthdays, and covered the death of Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson.

Other publishers that broke into the top ten included CBS News, ESPN, ABC News, and LADbible.

Read more on what drove Fox's biggest quarter on Facebook in 8+ years.

Native video (slightly) reclaims lead from photo

Native video returned as the top format on Facebook after briefly falling behind photo last quarter, accounting for 43% of the top 1,000 posts from these publishers, compared to 41% for photos.

While both formats remain dominant, this shows the consistent need for investment in video content for publishers to keep up with others.

Links came in at just 7%, but with two caveats:

  1. It was a far more successful tactic for the top publisher Fox News, where links accounted for 19% of the page’s engagement and 51% of its output.
  2. Publishers are often sharing links as part of photo posts, but Facebook counts these as photo posts, not links. In fact, 363 of the top 1,000 image posts included outbound links to reporting, showing links are being used in more nuanced ways.

Fox the Facebook outlier

Fox’s success becomes very apparent when comparing engagement to output, once again showing significant overperformance than that of its peers.

All three of the top publishers saw success in this respect, although LADbible didn’t overperform to the same extent as last quarter.

The correlation between engagements and posts on Facebook is marginal at best, with little obvious relationship between posting more frequently and driving engagement with those posts. Bloomberg and The Daily Mail posted a lot to no great avail, while ABC News posted with less than 60% of the frequency of some of its peers but remained in the top two publishers on Facebook by engagement.

CBS News uses video to grab attention on Facebook

CBS News also stood out this quarter, with engagement rising 65% compared to Q1 on Facebook.

Naturally, the publisher focuses on national news and events, but there was a particular emphasis on human-centric stories and viral videos. Examples of this include a post about a mother raccoon saving her baby, a lost child in the Arizona desert, and elephants protecting their young during an earthquake.

Read more on how CBS uses heartwarming content to cut through the Facebook noise.

90%

of engagements with CBS News on Facebook were with videos

Almost all the publisher’s engagement on Facebook came from video, with that accounting for 86% of its posts and 90% of its engagements on the platform. While others have succeeded with photo posts in the past, the archive of video footage that cable news has available can still be deeply valuable on Facebook.

Facebook vs. Instagram

Of these 50 publishers, exactly half of them had more engagement on Facebook, with exactly half getting more engagement on Instagram.

As a general rule, traditional news publishers performed better on Facebook, while those that have more visually striking content tended to do better on Instagram.

The latter group includes publishers such as Vogue and Sports Illustrated, who tend to have very image-driven content that matches the ideal for Instagram. But it also includes magazines that don’t have a huge amount of output like the New Yorker, the Economist, and Wired, who all also saw higher engagement on Instagram, as there’s a higher engagement per post ratio there.

Even on the hard news reporting side, there were some exceptions to the rule. While the big cable news channels all generally had more engagement on Facebook, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN all had more on Instagram. For the NYT in particular, this is driven by their photojournalism, often showcasing striking photos from around the world on their Instagram profile.

X

Here were some of the key takeaways for publishers on X in Q2:

 

  • Bleacher Report had the highest engagement of any publisher on X, with 25 million.
  • There was a rise in engagement on X for mainstream publishers, including the NYT.
  • Overall, publishers are still struggling on X relative to other platforms.

Bleacher Report stands out

Bleacher Report was far and away the top publisher on X in Q2, driving more than 25 million engagements with its content.

In fact, it was so successful that it drove a third of the overall engagement on X for this group of 50 publishers.

That’s the highest proportion of total engagement that we saw on any platform, with Fox getting 27% of Facebook engagement and ESPN getting 26% on TikTok.

Top posts

Sports content really stood out this quarter, with Bleacher Report having nine of the ten top posts in Q2. The only publisher to break Bleacher Report’s monopoly was ESPN, whose post about Luka Doncic watching a Mavs tribute video and crying squeaked into the top posts at number ten.

Almost no correlation between posting frequency and engagement on X

X had the weakest correlation between post volume and engagement of any of the platforms that we looked at, with a negligible relationship at best.

Despite only posting at 7% of the rate of Reuters, Bleacher Report had more than double the engagement of any of the publishers that we looked at, and ESPN also performed well despite a low volume of posts.

This shows that while we might all think of X as a news and politics platform, sports content does often overperform.

NYT goes international, but politics is the backbone

The New York Times, while not one of the top publishers, did see a substantial rise in engagement in Q2 compared to Q1, with a rise of 63%. This followed several quarters of declining engagement, so it’s an interesting reversal of a more long-term downward trend.

The very top posts were mostly driven by international news rather than US domestic news, with cricketer Virat Kohli’s retirement representing the top X post linking to an article from their sports reporting arm The Athletic. Other big posts focused on Israeli troops opening fire near a Gaza aid site, and a deadly stampede in Kenya.

Over the broader set of the NYT’s top 1,000 posts, politics does emerge as a key theme, especially breaking political news, which were responsible for more than a third of the top 1,000.

Read more on what made Q2 a bumper quarter for the New York Times.

The Economist’s Brazilian coverage resonates

It was also a bumper quarter of growth for The Economist on X, who saw a near 50% engagement rise compared to Q1. Interestingly, a lot of this was caused by ongoing controversies in Brazil around the legal system.

We’ve seen before with The Economist that their international coverage often resonates deeply—last time it was the publication’s coverage of Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan facing arrest and prosecution.

Read more on how The Economist's international coverage powered its Q2 success.

TikTok

Despite the overall drop in engagement, TikTok remained the top platform for engagement for most of these publishers, with the most successful seeing hundreds of millions of interactions on the platform.

Key takeaways from TikTok this quarter:

  • Despite a big fall in engagement, ESPN still had by far the highest level of interactions with 645 million.
  • Interactions and view count directly correlate, though this is less true for shares and comments than likes.
  • More frequent posting has a strong and direct correlation with higher levels of engagement, the strongest of any platform.

It’s still ESPN’s crown

We’ve discussed the success of sports in every version of this report, and it was the case again here, with only the Daily Mail able to break up the duopoly of ESPN and Bleacher Report.

Top posts

Though ESPN was by far the top publisher on TikTok, it actually wasn’t really anywhere near the top posts, which came from ABC News, Reuters, Metro, LADbible, and The Daily Mail.

ABC News had the top post with some local security camera footage. We’ve often seen local stories go national on TikTok, and that was true this time, as a truck was captured on video exploding in a Chicago suburb, which drove 14.9 million engagements.

@abcnews Home security camera footage captured the moment a truck exploded, damaging multiple homes in suburban Chicago. Police said the driver sustained minor injuries. Investigators believe a leaking propane tank being carried in the truck may have triggered the blast. ♬ original sound - ABC News
@reuters Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben & Jerry's ice cream, was arrested and dragged out of a Senate hearing by U.S. capitol police after protesting the war in Gaza during Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s testimony. "You're killing poor kids in Gaza and paying for it by cutting Medicaid for kids here," shouted Cohen, who had attended a pro-Palestine event earlier in the day, referring to Medicaid cuts proposed in the Republican spending bill and U.S. support for Israel's war in Gaza. #benandjerrys #bencohen #protest #gaza #rfkjr #senate #arrest ♬ original sound - Reuters

There were also videos of Ben & Jerry’s co-founder Ben Cohen being arrested, detainees sending an SOS message from an immigration facility, and an Australian journalist being hit by a rubber bullet during the LA protests.

This all shows that there is very much a place for local, on-the-ground reporting to succeed on TikTok, with three of the top five videos following that trend for the SPI group.

Yes, interactions and views do correlate

View count for videos is also available on TikTok, so we ran an analysis to see how much correlation there is between the two. And the answer is a lot!

The graph shows a logarithmic version of view counts vs. total interactions for the top 1,000 TikToks for this group of publishers, with a clear positive correlation (0.83 on the Pearson’s rank correlation coefficient, if you’re keeping score.)

This held true when we ran the same analysis for total likes, but it dropped slightly to 0.62 for both comments and shares. It’s still a moderately good indicator of viewership, but not as linear as the relationship between likes and views.

At the lower end, as the chart shows it is still possible to get a lot of views without getting that many interactions, but generally the more engagements, the higher the view count.

Post a lot to get success on TikTok

If you want to be successful on TikTok, you’ve got to post, and do it consistently. This was the platform with the clearest relationship between number of posts and engagement with those posts, with a Pearson’s correlation coefficient of  around 0.92.

ESPN posted the most and got the most engagement, while its two closest rivals for each were second and third by those metrics. The Daily Mail actually posted less than Bleacher Report but got about 50% more engagements, meaning its posts overperformed vs. the trend while Bleacher Report’s slightly underperformed.

That said, Bleacher Report found its way into the top three through sheer posting numbers, showing that, especially on TikTok, sheer output can be the answer.

ESPN’s drop in engagement

ESPN had a big drop in engagement this quarter, despite still being the top publisher, dropping from 1.22 billion to 645 million.

Almost every day in Q2 had lower engagements than the corresponding day in Q1. On its own, this would have been enough to see Q1 come out on top, but the contrast becomes even more clear when looking at the spikes in interest. Q1 saw multiple days where engagement rose over 30 million, while not one day in Q2 came close to matching that.

Read more: A comparative analysis of Q1 vs. Q2 for ESPN on TikTok, with a focus on what changed.

Reuters sees massive increase in TikTok engagement

Reuters went through the exact opposite of ESPN’s engagement pattern. Q1 was relatively quiet, but Q2 saw a sharp rise in engagement, climbing from 3.68 million to 19 million engagements.

This surge was fueled by a massive spike in interest on May 16th when Ben & Jerry’s co-founder Ben Cohen was arrested during a Senate hearing after protesting the war in Gaza. This post alone contributed to more than half of the publisher’s total engagements on TikTok , with almost 10 million engagements. The post continued to maintain momentum over the following few days, adding millions more engagements to Reuters total.

Read more on how Reuters quintupled its TikTok engagement in Q2.

Instagram

Here were some of the key takeaways for publishers on Instagram  in Q2:

  • Bleacher Report had the highest engagement of any publisher, with just shy of 200 million.
  • Instagram saw a dip of 16 percent in engagement for the fifty publishers.
  • Al Jazeera's international coverage of Iran, Gaza, and Israel were particularly resonant.

Sports still hold the title

This quarter saw another showdown between the leading sports publishers, with Bleacher Report holding onto the top spot and ESPN close behind. While it experienced a drop in overall engagement, Instagram remains their second most successful platform in terms of public interest.

Fox News, the BBC, and the New York Times continue representation for hard news publishers, but it was the addition of Al Jazeera’s English account that was particularly impressive this quarter, driven by its international coverage.

Top posts focus on dramatic visuals

When it comes to the top 10 posts on the platform, hard news is nowhere to be found, despite the overall success of some hard news publishers on the platform.

Vogue and LADbible highlight Instagram’s first strength which is entertainment. Vogue engaged audiences with Met Gala posts and celebrity news, while LADbible’s viral videos continue to rack up millions of engagements.

Visual content drives overperformance

Bleacher Report continued to lead all publishers in engagement while posting far less frequently than outlets such as People or NY Post. ESPN followed a similar pattern, proving that quality, and content fit for Instagram, can outweigh volume on the platform.

There was overall a very weak correlation between posting more frequently and getting more engagement on Instagram, with none of the top three publishers by engagement posting anywhere near as often as others that had less engaging content.

This shows that striking visual content, as well as a knowledge of what your audience is looking to you for, has much more chance of driving engagement than simply posting a lot on Instagram.

TIME quietly gains ground

The massive numbers seen from sports and lifestyle publishers don’t outweigh the subtle risers that we see among the mix each quarter, and that much was true for TIME. The news magazine saw an 18% increase in engagement, pulling in over 4.6 million interactions in Q2.

TIME acts as a digest of world events, and that much can be seen from its visually rich posts about major international stories. It’s a reminder that good reporting succeeds on Instagram when it's complemented by strong design.

Read more on the drivers behind TIME's Q2 success on Instagram. 

Al Jazeera spikes late in the quarter

Al Jazeera’s English account also saw notable growth this quarter, with spikes in mid-June contributing to its increase of 26% compared to Q1. The biggest of these coincided with Israel’s attacks on Iran, which was heavily covered by the publisher, largely through Reels showing on-the-ground footage.

Greta Thunberg’s "Freedom Flotilla" and the death of Pope Francis were also among the top posts, all of which saw hundreds of thousands of engagements.

Al Jazeera’s reporting about Gaza and Israel has generally been a high driver of engagement on the platform, and 723 of the publisher’s top 1,000 Instagram posts were about Gaza, Israel, or Iran, showing how much it has dominated the conversation, and how it has become a trusted source for many.

Read more on Al Jazeera's highly visual coverage of international conflict.

Key takeaways for 2025

TikTok remains dominant, but less so:

Despite a 31% drop in engagement, TikTok still accounted for the majority of publisher interactions. However, the dip signals a potential plateau in its unrivaled reach.

Facebook is unexpectedly stable for news:

It was the only platform to see an increase in engagement (+6%), with hard news content—especially from Fox News—driving much of that growth.

Output volume ≠ guaranteed success:

On most platforms, especially X and Facebook, there was a weak correlation between how much a publisher posted and how much engagement they earned. Quality and relevance often outweighed quantity.

Publishers remain vulnerable to platform shifts:

ESPN and Bleacher Report still topped the charts, but their heavy reliance on TikTok made them especially susceptible to downturns in engagement.

Visual storytelling is key, but varies by platform:

Instagram continues to favor visually rich and lifestyle content (Met Gala, viral clips), while Facebook leaned into native video and politics.

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