The Face of Facebook’s Most Popular Page
A little-known United Nations organization had some of the most popular postings on Facebook in the last three months, according to the analytics firm NewsWhip. It is UNICEF,the United Nations International Childrens’ Education Fund. It would be nice to think that’s because people care about saving children around the world — like this little girl. That may be a factor, but the real reason is a change to Facebook’s algorithms.
It’s something Facebook created called “knowledge panels.” In response to all the criticism that it was spreading misinformation and disinformation, Facebook introduced the ‘knowledge panels’ into the process. These are sources of information that have been vetted and approved by Facebook admins. When someone does a search on Facebook, these ‘knowledge panels’ come up. This operational change is clearly the primary driver of the UNICEF popularity. UNICEF scored 11 of the top 15 postings as a result. A UNICEF post about food going from to plate also also scored the most “Likes” of any posting. That would indicate it had some inherent popularity.
Take UNICEF out of the picture and you get a broader picture of what posts are popular. The American Music Academy scored the highest level of engagement by far with more than 18 Million Likes, Comments and Shares. The Newswhip analysis shows that much of that popularity was driven by the fans of the K-Pop group, BTS. Three of the top 15 postings were scored by The Dodo, which posts videos about animals.
Not surprisingly, six of the top posts came from celebrities. Somewhat surprisingly three of them are sports figures. Even more surprising two of those sports figures are Cricketeers (people who play Cricket) and the third is Cristiana Ronaldo, a Portuguese professional football (aka soccer) player. He has an incredible 123 Million followers. Further proof of just how popular soccer is, the publisher with the most ‘Likes” (an incredible 81 Million) is Goal, which is a page set up for soccer lovers
Let me add a couple of points of clarification that may help understand the analytics:
· Newswhip only looks at English language postings and publishers. So obviously the soccer postings are in English despite where they originate.
· Newswhip defines engagements as the combination of likes, shares and comments. It strikes me that a share or a comment should be weighted more heavily because it involves more thought. Proof of that is that ‘likes’ are the most common reaction.
· The analytics need to be broken down into what I would call the “3-P’s.” — Publishers, Pages and Posts. Newswhip separates Publishers from individual pages and memes or humor accounts.
As you might expect, politics was the dominant topic on Facebook, accounting for 29% of all the postings, followed by the Covid crisis with 22% and then Black Lives Matter with 18%. Oddly and somewhat strangely, death was the primary topic in one out of ten postings.
On the topic of politics, the charge by some ultra conservatives and right-wing groups that Facebook favors ‘liberals’ and discounts conservatives is not supported by the facts. Of the 15 top publishers on Facebook conservatives account for six of the top performers with 1.1 Billion engagements while the other nine account for 1.3 Billion engagements.
To add to the analysis, the six conservative Publishers are truly conservative:
Fox News, The Daily Wire, Breitbart, The Daily Mail in the U.K., the New York Post, and The Blaze.
The nine other Publishers are:
NBC, CBS, CNN, New York Times, The Washington Post, BBC, NPR, The Hill and Yahoo. Some of them might be labelled liberal or progressive, although many of them would dispute that labelling, and rightfully so.
Further evidence that the accusations that Facebook penalizes conservative sites while rewarding liberal sites can be found by looking at the Publishers with the ‘most engaged” posts. Occupy Democrats took the top spot with 158.6 Million engagements. But that wasn’t that far ahead of Fox News which got 134 Million engagements. Add to that the fact that Breitbart got 94 Million engagements while none of the so-called mainstream media which are often accused of being liberal scored at anything like this.
The reactions the political publishers get on Facebook may tell you something. Breitbart drew the most Angry responses (15.2 Million) while Fox News drew the most Comments (21 Million.) Occupy Democrats had the most Shares (33.3 Million), as well as the most Wow’s (2 Million) and the most Sad’s (4.7 Million).
Trump dominated the social media world in the final six months leading up to the election. Part of it was due to Trump’s often critical and more often, controversial, postings and comments. He scored well above President-election Joe Biden, but this Newswhip analysis shows that Biden had equal levels of engagement and Trump was ahead primarily because of his long reign on the social medial environment.
https://www.newswhip.com/2020/10/top-stories-publishers-narratives-presidential-race-trump-biden/
Lastly the Newswhip analysis shows that people still have a sense of humor despite all the anger and hate that seems to envelope us. The top Facebook page by a long, long shot was Sarcasmlol which, as the name implies, provides sarcastic looks at life with a touch of humor. It had more than 416 Million engagements. That was more than double the second place engagement which was Donald Trump with 176 Million.
Add to the mix 9gag which shares such great ideas as “how to swap faces with your favorite memes” or how to “paint like your cat.” Or memes which provides parody meme posts. Or TheDodoSite which shows animals doing strange and odd things. Or Facebook page called Sadcasm which scores with such hits as “my daughter stole my boyfriend from me” and “I broke my four year relationship for money.”
So, when the news gets you down, you have several sites on Facebook that will provide some relief. And if you delve into the Newswhip analysis, you will find much more that may pique your interest.
