This is What Happened to Biggest News Pages on Facebook After the US Election
Data from the social media monitoring company EzyInsights shows how news giants’ engagement levels are sinking and approaching medium-sized pages since early 2017. There may be several reasons behind the trend that affects virtually all analysed countries:
- United States and United Kingdom
- Continental Europe
- Nordic countries
The huge rise occurred around and after the US Presidential Election and Inauguration of Donald Trump, and is most prominent in the US. When we look at the European countries, top engaging content is not always related to political issues — but it is reasonable to suggest that Facebook got heated for the same reasons in Europe, too. Now the platform is overcoming an over-saturation of sorts.
Along with fake news also came fake engagement. It caused non-proportional growth on some pages, as in the case of USA Today (https://ezyinsights.com/the-strange-tale-of-usa-todays-facebook-page/). This has likely had at least some negative effect on how Facebook reach develops — both in terms of regulation from Facebook and perhaps also how users view Facebook content.
On a less dramatic note, Facebook may also be fixing the giant pages’ reach in order to give space to smaller, local news pages. Facebook is known to invest on more private forms of sharing and niche communities, such as Facebook groups.
Let’s first see what were the biggest pages in 2017 in each country, and then their engagement trends.
Biggest News and Tabloids on Facebook in 2017
Here are the biggest news pages on Facebook in each country, sorted by average weekly engagement (reactions, comments and shares) in 2017. Please note that there are some broadcaster news publishers that belong to several genres and will not appear on this list.
United States
United Kingdom
France
Spain
Germany
Netherlands
Sweden
Norway
Denmark
Finland
Engagement Trends for Top News and Tabloids
Here are the trends for the Top 10 news and tabloid pages on Facebook in each country. Note that the charts show the general trend (30 days moving average) and not the actual times when engagement took place.
Political events, such as elections in the UK, France, Germany and Spain, and crimes or accidents, such as the terror attack in Stockholm in April, have had a strong effect to the trends.
One could conclude that even though the political events may be one of the strongest causes of news pages’ engagement increase, the levels are now getting back to balance. Facebook news landscape is cooling down after an overheating that is increasingly regarded as problematic. It may be the time for the smaller, more local news pages to grow and do relatively better.
