Friday, 1 April 2011

The Like Log Study: What can we learn from Facebook reactions to online news?


The Like Log Study from Yury Lifshits on Vimeo.


[Single Infographics]

The Rankings

New York Times is the leader of social engagement with 2.3M likes/month, 400 likes for a median story and 13 articles in top 40. Wall Street Journal story "Why Chinese Moms Are Superior" is the greatest hit with 340,000 likes.

The Numbers

There are around 10 likes per 1000 pageviews (across several websites with public PV numbers). Decay of engagement is extremely sharp, with less than 20% likes happening after the first 24 hours.

The Trends

Stories about Facebook, Apple, Verizon, Groupon, future and infographics are universally popular across technology blogs. Articles about Microsoft, Amazon, Samsung, cloud computing, TV and search see much less engagement.

Recommendations

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  5. Invest in social media optimization

The Rankings

Facebook allows anyone to get the total number of likes for any URL. For this study we collected like counts for 45 popular news sites over the period of three months. You can sort our collection by any parameter.
Site Total likes Top story Top 13 stories Top 90 stories Median story # of 3+ liked stories
New York Times 6815796 105289 12% 36% 398 3955
BBC 4331367 140012 13% 38% 225 3867
NPR 2549613 119351 18% 48% 98 2576
The Guardian 1883161 78066 21% 47% 122 2408
Yahoo! Sports 1774183 40490 16% 47% 32 3325
Fox News 1730704 33281 13% 38% 71 3644
Yahoo! News 1693928 42995 26% 60% 95 2476
BuzzFeed 1479737 112289 28% 57% 60 3251
TechCrunch 1441201 7475 3% 12% 484 2595
Yahoo! Shine 1385644 58843 29% 78% 0 751
CNN 1263924 238596 42% 78% 0 690
Wall Street Journal 1205701 342294 58% 81% 1 1353
Mashable! 1041076 69290 23% 44% 190 2035
AOL News 1010507 48115 25% 54% 43 1940
Yahoo! Music 1002684 55338 24% 62% 28 1371
TIME Magazine 890017 328192 51% 72% 28 2709
Yahoo! Movies 758456 42002 34% 80% 45 667
Huffington Post 710561 42005 35% 71% 25 1281
Reuters 655062 152780 42% 67% 15 3281
Engadget 600962 26858 16% 40% 60 2961
The Economist 593271 63317 25% 49% 97 1679
Vanity Fair 592001 44998 46% 80% 35 1027
Forbes 538588 56695 47% 70% 19 2305
Wired 469834 29806 25% 57% 107 1220
Change.org 400062 42310 42% 64% 42 1601
The Daily Beast 370000 14752 22% 49% 17 2140
Bloomberg 352700 15092 29% 57% 11 2906
Yahoo! OMG 317684 23268 38% 73% 6 1929
CNET 305803 11273 23% 54% 31 2028
Gawker 251199 48976 53% 85% 0 563
Yahoo! Finance 220971 30228 52% 97% 0 317
Fast Company 199552 19395 29% 59% 30 1470
Business Insider 199545 13630 46% 76% 3 1239
Good Magazine 197445 7301 22% 51% 25 1706
ReadWriteWeb 144279 13763 39% 60% 15 1676
BNET 136556 13481 44% 70% 5 1540
Business Week 89036 10515 33% 58% 1 1418
eHow 87843 9665 44% 72% 0 945
Inc Magazine 87540 5553 29% 58% 17 953
GigaOm 64357 4284 32% 54% 6 1686
VentureBeat 51021 1804 18% 42% 10 1722
Associated Content 49383 12398 77% 93% 0 405
All Things D 21502 1872 43% 80% 0 401
paidContent.org 9955 942 36% 68% 1 441
Poynter 8660 1207 42% 79% 0 294
We use 13 top stories as a model for "one story per week" strategy and 90 stories as a model for "one story per day" strategy.

[Single Infographics]


Reference: Yury Lifshits. Ediscope: Social Analytics for Online News. Yahoo! Labs, Tech. Report No. YL-2010-008.

Short URL: http://bit.ly/likelog
Contact: lifshits@yahoo-inc.com
Released under CC BY 3.0 license

The Like Log


45 sites, 100K+ articles, 40M+ reactions
Three months from 10/2010 to 01/2011
"Total" facebook counts:
likes + shares + facebook comments

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