The Top 10 Stories on Social Media in 2015 – TrackMaven

The Top 10 Stories on Social Media in 2015

top news stories

Shortly after the Paris terrorist attacks, The New York Times analyzed media coverage of the attacks (with a little help from the TrackMaven software platform). The effort placed media coverage of the attack in context, illustrating its gravity; in 2015, Paris was the only news event to register among the year’s top stories from major Internet and media companies.

On social media, some stories transmute into bottled lightning, while others wither in obscurity. After all, stories are a form of social communion. Maria Konnikova explains the gripping, sometimes-bewitching power of stories in her book, “The Confidence Game: Why We Fall For It… Every Time”:

“Stories bring us together. We can talk about them and bond over them. They are shared knowledge, shared legend, and shared history; often, they shape our shared future. Stories are so natural that we don’t notice how much they permeate our lives.”

So which stories gripped our imaginations (and our news feeds) in 2015? We used data from the TrackMaven software platform to find out. Here are the top 10 stories on social media in 2015:

The top 10 news stories on Twitter in 2015

1. 51.7K interactions via Forbes:

2. 36.8K interactions via USA Today:

3. 34.2K interactions via BuzzFeed:

4. 25.7K interactions via BuzzFeed:

5. 24.9 interactions via BuzzFeed:

6. 24.6K interactions via The New York Times:

7. 23.3K interactions via BuzzFeed:

8. 22.5K interactions via BBC News:

9. 22.5K interactions via CNN:

10. 22.4K interactions via BBC News:

Takeaways from the top 10 Twitter stories

Celebrity news = share-worthy news. Justin Bieber drives engagement for Forbes, and Taylor Swift is a bankable topic for BuzzFeed.

Among more substantive (or non-celebrity) news — as The New York Times concluded, and we confirm above — coverage of the Paris attacks is the only news event to rank among the year’s top stories. CNN, BBC News, and The New York Times all delivered top 10 tweets on developing coverage of the attacks.

The top 10 news stories on Facebook in 2015

1. 2.7M interactions via BBC News:

2. 2.1M interactions via BBC News:

Otto the bulldog has broken the world record for skateboarding through the “longest human tunnel” http://bbc.in/1HCAj1r

Posted by BBC News on Thursday, November 12, 2015

3. 1.7M interactions via ABC News:

A+ TEACHER: Special education teacher begins each day by complimenting students, one by one. http://abcn.ws/1X5GWuY

Posted by ABC News on Tuesday, November 17, 2015

4. 1.6M interactions via ABC News:

SOULMATES: 8-year-old with cancer hopes to enjoy his final days with his true love by his side, a 7-year-old classmate: “They just wanted to be together.” http://abcn.ws/1kFvNFk

Posted by ABC News on Wednesday, November 18, 2015

5. 1.2M interactions via BuzzFeed:

Anyone can be a princess on Halloween!

Read more: http://bzfd.it/1jdoyE4

Posted by BuzzFeed on Wednesday, October 7, 2015

6. 1.2M interactions via USA Today:

The U.S. stands with #Paris after #ParisAttacks, says Arizona Republic cartoonist Steve Benson.

Posted by USA TODAY on Saturday, November 14, 2015

7. 1.1M interactions via CBS News:

A teenager and his mom were driving home when he suddenly asked her to stop the car. His mom stopped and asked: “What’s…

Posted by CBS News on Thursday, February 19, 2015

8. 686K interactions via ABC News:

“This rude, disrespectful, and awful behavior is unacceptable and they owe you an apology.”Mom’s Facebook apology for kids’ bad behavior at the movies brings recipient to tears: http://abcn.ws/1Cq3r67

Posted by ABC News on Monday, March 30, 2015

9. 640K interactions via ABC News:

JUST IN: French jets have begun bombing the defacto ISIS capital of Raqqa, dropping 20 bombs and targeting a terrorist…

Posted by ABC News on Sunday, November 15, 2015

10. 621K interactions via Fox News:

Update: French fighter jets reportedly dropped 20 bombs on a command and control center, jihadi recruitment center,…

Posted by Fox News on Sunday, November 15, 2015

Takeaways from the top 10 Facebook stories

Sentimentality sells. While Twitter’s top stories dealt with celebrity or breaking news, Facebook’s topics err on the side of sentimentality. With posts ranked third, fourth, and ninth, ABC News is especially expert at elevating heartwarming human-interest stories into viral phenomena.

And while news outlets including CNN, BBC News, and The New York Times had top stories on Twitter covering the the Paris attacks themselves, ABC News and Fox News made waves on Facebook with coverage of the subsequent bombing of ISIS strongholds (ranked ninth and tenth).

What does it say about our online culture that a bulldog in roller skates (see number 2) ranks above coverage of terrorist attacks as a top-engaging 2015 story on Facebook? Perhaps it reflects a healthy, human balance between gravity and levity. Perhaps it reflects our ever-shortening attention spans. I’ll leave the judgments up to you. Regardless, there’s much to learn from the stories that popped (and the stories that flopped) in 2015. To see the top posts from leading brands in your industry, request your free custom demo of the TrackMaven platform.

Methodology

We used the TrackMaven software platform to analyze the social media posts from major Internet and media companies across all of 2015. Stories published early in 2015 have a natural advantage to accumulate more social engagement; however, the data highlight the impact of major stories from the second half of 2015, such as the Paris attacks.

Total interactions includes likes, shares, and comments on Facebook, and retweets and favorites on Twitter. Clicking the interaction total (i.e. 593K interactions) in each list will show you the post in the TrackMaven software platform. The relative impact score in the top right corner of each post is a TrackMaven metric which measures how many more (or fewer) interactions a post has compared with the brand’s average (see below).

top news stories

The top tweet of the year from Forbes, for example, has a “239X” relative impact score, meaning the tweet had 239 times as many interactions as the brand’s average.

Our analysis includes the following Internet and media companies:

  1. ABC News
  2. BBC News
  3. Bloomberg
  4. Business Insider
  5. Buzzfeed
  6. CBS News
  7. CNN
  8. Forbes
  9. Fox News
  10. Huffington Post
  11. LA Times
  12. Mashable
  13. Mic
  14. NBC News
  15. Politico
  16. Quartz
  17. Telegraph
  18. The Atlantic
  19. The Daily Beast
  20. The Guardian
  21. The New York Times
  22. The Wall Street Journal
  23. The Washington Post
  24. TIME
  25. USA Today
  26. Vice
  27. Vox Media
  28. Yahoo News

Want to see the top posts from brands in your industry? Request your free custom demo to see TrackMaven in action!

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