Political Heat Pushes Fox News Into Lead Among Facebook Publishers

The political horse race continues to be a winner for Fox News and its affiliates.

The conservative news organization was the leading publisher on Facebook in terms of overall engagement, according to NewsWhip’s August rankings. Fox’s move to the top — before July, no organization other than the Huffington Post or BuzzFeed ranked in the top two — was fueled by news about the presidential race, including the first GOP debate hosted by the network.

Fox had 35.6 million likes, comments and shares on its Facebook posts, 2.3 million more than second-place BuzzFeed. The HuffPo, which led the list in July, was nearly 10 million back in fifth place. Overall, NewsWhip reported lower engagement for publishers in the month — citing the fact that August is a traditionally sleepy month for news. Fox’s numbers fell compared to July, but a volume of posts nearly 10 times more than BuzzFeed kept its fans engaged.

The Huffington Post had a tough month, also falling from its lead position in number of total shares. BuzzFeed took over the top spot for that metric, with 5.9 million shares, more than 1 million ahead of Huffington, despite the fact that HuffPo posted nearly three times as many articles as BuzzFeed. Fox was second in shares with 5.4 million.

Most Tweeted In August

NewsWhip’s Twitter rankings continued to be dominated by news sites, and engagement was down there also. The BBC and New York Times, which retained the top two spots, each had about 400,000 fewer tweets in August compared to July. Fox showed strength on Twitter also, moving from ninth to fifth.

(GOP debate caricature by DonkeyHotey, used via Creative Commons license.)

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