BuzzFeed has been named the "most social" publisher on Facebook in a ranking of August's most shared online content, with the BBC boasting the best performance on Twitter.
BuzzFeed had almost 16m combined Facebook interactions on content published in the month, recording the highest number of any of the media sites on the list. The social news and entertainment site produced near to 7,500 pieces of content in August and recorded 7.8m likes, 4.3 comments and almost 3.8m shares on Facebook.
According to NewsWhip, the news aggregator and analysis company that compiled the ranking using data from their content analysis platform Spike, only 2.4m combined Facebook interactions were recorded for BuzzFeed back in September 2012.
But BuzzFeed aren't the only ones to have seen a big rise in social interactions since last year; NewsWhip measured a 165% increase in under 12 months in the total number of Facebook interactions recorded by the top 50 online publishers.
The Huffington Post followed BuzzFeed in second place with more than 3m Facebook shares and almost 6m likes in August. Although the number of likes, shares and comments on Huffington Post content has more than doubled since September last year, it still wasn't enough to beat BuzzFeed.
But despite not hitting the top spot, the Huffington Post did produce the most 'social' piece of content in August; their '23 Signs You're Secretly an Introvert' article was the most shared and commented article on Facebook.
Upworthy, a social news aggregator that launched in March 2012 with the aim to "make things that matter" go viral, has recorded "phenomenal" growth according to NewsWhip. Publishing only 216 pieces of content between the 1 and 31 August 2013, the site still managed to harness 5.3m combined Facebook interactions (placing it fifth above the likes of the New York Times and Fox).
Of the top five most social publishers on Facebook in August, three are online-only publishers with a focus on "share-friendly" content: BuzzFeed, The Huffington Post and Upworthy.
Twitter shares shift the media hierarchy again with traditional news outlets and tech sites dominating the top 20 with the strongest performance on the social networking site. The BBC had more than 2m tweets for the 8,016 articles it produced in August - putting them far ahead of Mashable, the New York Times, The Guardian, CNN and even BuzzFeed.
NewsWhip plan to publish the top social publishers ranking monthly. "What will be very interesting for us is comparing September 2012 and September 2013 for a real "apples and apples" benchmarking of how much social distribution of news has grown over the past year," says Paul Quigley, co-founder of NewsWhip. "Given that comparing last September with a slow news month like August still showed such a strong growth, we're expecting impressive numbers."
You can explore the data in the tables below and in the downloadable spreadsheet. We'd love to hear your views.
• Large sites with various sub-domains have been grouped together to give an overall figure for the publisher. For instance, figures for the New York Times include stats for nytimes.com, along with various blogs.nytimes.com subdomains (These are in red in the table below).
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