As we move out of the first quarter of 2014, we look at the biggest performers on Facebook in March.
As the Facebook algorithm/shift to mobile/social optimisation conversation drifts on, one thing we’ve noticed is that Facebook engagement for top publishers rarely declines as the months pass.
As we continue to notice month after month, total Facebook interactions rise throughout the table. In February, 4 of the top 10 publishers had less than 2m shares. Last month, none of the top 10 had under 2m shares, while Fox News pushed past 2.5m shares. All this activity goes some way to show that Facebook’s algorithm changes haven’t been all that bad for publishers, or at least not for the bigger ones. That doesn’t mean exponential growth for every single site, every single month, but it certainly doesn’t indicate that changes in timeline appearance criteria is crushing social engagement, either. (Although organic page reach is certainly decreasing).
Once again, it’s BuzzFeed who top our list, with almost 47.5m combined Facebook interactions for content published during March. And yet again, their best performing pieces socially are interactive quizzes.
The New York Times saw a substantial drop-off in interactions from February to March, with just over 7m Facebook engagements with their March content. It’s the first time that the site has dropped out of our Facebook top 10 since we started compiling this data in August 2013. The BBC are also noticeably absent from our top rankings.
Meanwhile, Fox News had a strong month, climbing from ninth to third spot in the overall Facebook rankings.
Of the viral-oriented publishers we’ve been seeing so much of so far this year, it was the Independent Journal Review that did the best on Facebook in March. The conservative site pulled in over 11.6m interactions for their March content, beating viral competitors Upworthy and Viral Nova. However, as the above chart shows, Upworthy still managed to perform stronger in terms of Facebook shares alone.
Check out the top 25 publishers and their stats below. We’ll be back with March’s biggest Twitter publishers and more social data insights on the blog soon, so don’t forget to subscribe for updates.
Questions? Comments? Requests? Let us know in the comments below, or on Twitter @NewsWhip.
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 (including the BBC, the Huffington Post and News Corp). If you want to get ahead of trending content in your niche, there’s a free trial for new users.
‘Total FB Interactions’ = Likes (or Recommends), Comments and Shares combined.
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.