Newswhip's Facebook Publishing Report Highlights Viral Content Trends in Q3 2021

Facebook is quite the hub of viral web content, and a latest quarterly report from Newswhip on the types of content that managed to make any kind of headway at all on the platform reveals a lot about the state of the site in general. One trend that has been noted involves a shift away from politics subject. Stories that were posted on the platform often heavily involved politics, with around half of them adhering to that genre previously, but in the third quarter of 2021 only 17% of stories shared on the platform were politics related with all things having been considered and taken into account.

Types of articles in the top 100 stories: Q3 2021

With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that the variety of interactions and engagements that people are making are not all that diverse these days either. Around 56% of engagement on Facebook involved likes, with 17% being Loves, 12% being shares and 7% being comments. This seems to indicate that Facebook’s user base are consuming content rather passively, especially when you look at the low rate of shares and comments as well as the prevalence of the rather muted interaction that is a Facebook like.

Most common reactions to top 10,000 posts by percentage

Links are also low performing, with 895 of the top 10,000 posts including links. Native video posts comprised over 37% of the top 10,000 Facebook posts, with photos doing even better with 41.58% of the same list. Facebook often tries to create an insular community so that people only see things that have been posted directly to Facebook, and link tend to fall by the wayside in this regard. While that can do a lot to help Facebook promote organic content on its own platform, it also creates a bit of a bubble that people often struggle to escape from especially in situations where Facebook is the only social media platform that they use.

Top 10,000 Facebook posts by format

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