A Look At Today’s Social Media World

The latest figures on Facebook traffic paint a picture of a Facebook and social media world that is changing in many ways and yet, in some ways, staying the same. Changing in terms of a greater worldwide perspective, and staying the same in terms of funny and unusual videos being a key driver.

The figures come from the marketing analytics firm Newswhip which measures the level of engagement for publishers, pages and individuals on Facebook. The latest report focuses on the second quarter of 2022.

While ‘fun’ posts continue to be a key part of Facebook postings — Three facts stand out:

— The most obvious is the dramatic drop in ranking of the alt-right conservative publisher The Daily Wire from #1 to #6.

— Despite that, conservatives’ choice of content continues to be a dominant characteristic of Facebook popularity.

— The third is the equally dramatic increase in the popularity of publishers and pages from non-English speaking countries.

Those countries include Nigeria, Kenya, Spain. India — and Philippines publishers, five of whom scored top places in several different categories. The Filipino wins may be understandable in part because of a) the high profile, hotly contested election and b) because English is the official language of the Philippines. The NewsWhip analysis focuses only on English language Facebook publishers and posts. But that doesn’t explain it completely.

Two of the publishers, Philippine Star and Inquirerdotnet, focus on news and information. So the election probably did impact their rankings. That doesn’t fully explain the other three. Pep.ph focuses on ‘local showbiz’ while Kami.com.ph focuses on “trending news on entertainment, local gossip and local people.” However, Kami also adds in what is called OFW — Overseas Filipino Worker, which ABS-CBN News also emphasizes with its “stories, videos and multimedia for Filipinos worldwide.”

The ‘secret’ to the Inquirer.net’s success may be its ability to get a reaction from its followers. The publisher can claim another achievement in this. In the analysis of the publishers getting the ‘top reactions,’ it scored in three categories: The most HaHas with 16 Million, the most Sad’s with 3.8 Million and the most Loves with a massive 31.5 Million. Obviously

To add a completely different perspective to this, keep in mind that this was the year that Filipino, Maria Ressa, won the Nobel Peace Prize for her “efforts to safeguard freedom of expression which is a precondition for democracy and a lasting peace.” She is the founder of the online news site Rappler which rightfully claims it is ‘driven by uncompromising journalism.’ The co-recipient of the Peace Prize was Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov. Less than ten journalists have been awarded the prize in its long history. For the record, Ressa’s Rappler page has 5.3 million followers.

What may be a little more surprising is the popularity of the Kenyan sites. Again, English is the official language of Kenya, along with Swahili. But there was no election in Kenya, like there was in the Philippines. Yet two Nigerian Facebook publishers scored highly in several different categories. And to top off the mystery of the popularity, two of the Nigerian publishers are consistently in the top rankings on Facebook.

The Nigerian publisher Legit.ng has consistently scored as one of the “most engaged publlishers” in the Newswhip rankings for nearly a year now despite having ‘only’ 6 Million followers. The other Nigerian publisher, YabaLeftOnline.com, this time with ‘only’ 5.8 Million followers also scored in the ‘top stories’ category focusing on “entertaining and viral content.”

The third African publisher to score, tuko.co.ke, based in Kenya also scored in the ‘top stories’ category with its similar focus on “bright entertainment, gossip stories and human engaging stories.”

As a matter of perspective, keep in mind that these three publishers are competing against massive western publishers like Fox, CNN, BBC, NBC, CBS, ABC, the New York Times and others which have two or three times as many followers… and LOTS more money.

The other factoid that stood out was the drop in the popularity of The Daily Wire. It has been a consistent dominating force on Facebook for two years. Its ultra-conservative stance along with its popularity has been one of the key factoids disproving the claim that Facebook penalizes conservatives and favors progressives.

The Daily Mail out of the United Kingdom took over the #1 spot for ‘most engaged publisher’ for the second quarter with more than 113 Million ‘engagements.’ NewsWhip defines engagements as the total of likes, loves, shares, comments along with angry, sad and wow reactions. The Daily Mail is known for its sometimes racy, and questionable coverage. So the secret to its success should come as no surprise. It was its extensive — aka excessive — coverage of the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard court case. Four out of its five top stories were about that.

Again, let’s look at some perspective. The #2 spot went to NBC, but the NBC figures include not only the network but its affiliates as well. The #3 spot went to…. surprise, surprise… the Nigerian publisher Legit.ng, noted earlier. Fox took the #4 spot, possibly disproving again the anti-conservative criticism of Facebook while The Mirror of London took #5.

The Daily Wire at #6 is a big drop, but to return to the point of perspective. Its 51 Million engagements came from ‘only’ 3.6 Million followers. The Daily Mail has five times that many followers while NBC has three times that many. The Daily Wire’s followers are engaged… aka passionate.

One other piece of ‘perspective.” In the category of “most engaged stories” of the second quarter, the story with the most engagements was Fox News’s piece on the football coach who won a Supreme Court ruling in favor of post-game prayers. It actually was ahead of ABC News’s story on the tragedy at Uvalde where 19 children and 2 teachers were murdered: 968K to 915K.

More perspective: The third highest engaged story was The Daily Wire’s piece on Florida rejecting books containing ‘critical race theory… and other indoctrinating concepts.’ That won out over Politico’s post on the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v Wade: 871K to 829K.

One last piece of ‘perspective’ — or observation: The stories that scored at the top by genre. Politics continues to be a strong driver with 16% of the articles focused on that. There was what you might call a tie for the #2 spot — with the Depp/ Heart trial getting 13% of the top articles and the deaths of celebrities like Ray Liotta and Gilbert Gottfried also accounting for 13%. Guns accounted for 10% of the top stories while the Ukraine crisis accounted for only 9%.

One last note. As reported at the start of his piece, Facebook is changing in its audience reach, and politics remains an important content driver, but the real drivers remain those fun or unusual or off-the-wall posts that elicit an emotional reaction. In the listing of posts by reaction, for example, notice that the one post that wasn’t that way got the most Angry responses, but it also got the least reactions of any of the categories.