NN: The balance between hard and soft news

[Logo]( The balance between hard and soft news Hi there, It’s been a hard time to be a consumer of news. We don’t necessarily expect news to be cheerful, but with natural disasters, political upheaval, gun violence, and Hollywood scandals, perhaps it’s not surprising that Bored Panda took the number one spot in our most recent publisher rankings. Looking at the data, some of the viral site's success was driven from Facebook Pages that promote light-hearted and positive content. Bored Panda’s emphasis on feel-good, heavily visual content may be providing an antidote to hard news. However, news publishers generally made up the remainder of our rankings, with Fox News’s coverage of the NFL kneeling protest accounting for four out of five top stories from the publisher. The New York Times saw its top stories come from a human interest piece on the hurricane, women's right to drive in Saudi Arabia, and an NFL player's op-ed on the kneeling protest. Digging down deeper into our top publishers, it appears a select number of stories that go mega-viral each month account for a huge proportion of the sites’ overall monthly total. What does this mean? Rather than churning out thousands of articles, it might be work focusing energy on creating a few pieces of highly shareable, emotionally compelling content. Quality over quantity. [For the full ranking of the 25 top publishers, check out the blog](. How to stand out, straight from the 'Book's mouth We are constantly studying how to succeed on social. But does our data align with what Facebook and Instagram are encouraging? We went to ONA to find out. Here's what we picked up from Peter Elkins-Williams, Lead for Newspapers in the U.S. at Facebook, and Lila King, Head of News Partnerships at Instagram. Focus on the shares Shares drive newsfeed behavior for Facebook, so focusing on the shareable elements of a story in key. We’ve analyzed before the types of stories that get [shares vs. likes](. Make longer videos Videos that are over 90 seconds long are shared 30 percent more on average. And don’t forget mobile users — half of all mobile traffic is video, and that number is expected to rise to 75 percent in the next five years. Crowdsource your content Whether it’s through Facebook groups or hacking Instagram’s Explore tab with an alternative, highly-focused profile, your audience can be a tremendous source of content ideation and feedback. [For more tips and tricks, read our full round-up](. Why the AP is the secret champion on social media The AP's traditional wire stories drive tremendous engagements on Facebook. Here's why this is a victory for journalism. [Photo]( Five secrets to how food publishers go viral How are food publishers like BuzzFeed Tasty so perfect for social media? We look at some top tactics of viral food sites. [Photo]( Finding big stories while they're still small Of the millions of stories published everyday, how can you quickly find what's going to go big on social? Noted - How much time do we spend on media? [eMarketer]( has the latest. - Propaganda and espionage are being waged through social media. Here’s what you need to know about [Facebook](, [Twitter](, and Mother Russia. (And maybe [Pokemon Go](?!) - BuzzFeed believes it has found a way to [make ads]( that we’d actually want to look at. That’s it for the week! If you have any questions, give us a shout over [on Twitter](, (plus, check out our photos from our event in Berlin yesterday) and please [recommend our newsletter]( onto a friend if you found it useful. Have a wonderful weekend, Gabriele and the NewsWhip team. Useful Links [NewsWhip Spike]( [NewsWhip Analytics]( [Resources]( [Blog]( [Contact]( [www.newswhip.com]( About Us Millions of stories, videos, and social posts are published each day, sparking billions of interactions. NewsWhip transforms this ocean of social data into actionable insights to inform your content strategy. NewsWhip products show you what audiences are engaging with in real time and what has performed best historically – in every vertical. This email was sent to {EMAIL}. If you no longer wish to receive these emails you may [unsubscribe]( at any time.