Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Using NewsWhip Analytics, we found the top 10 stories from five of our top 10 Facebook publishers in December 2016. NewsWhip Analytics can give data on hundreds of stories from different publishers over various time periods, allowing audience development and analytics teams to perform in-depth analysis on their most successful content.

We ranked the stories by total engagements they received on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest, and then calculated the average word count for the top ten stories. We didn’t include headlines, subheadings, pull quotes, or calls to action within the story (‘Read More’, ‘Scroll down for video’ etc) in the word count.

Here’s what the average length of the top ten most engaged stories from five top publishers were in December....

When a helicopter crashed in a densely populated part of London around 8am today, next to one of the busiest trainlines in Europe and a large bus station, the news was always going to be broken, within seconds, by members of the public on Twitter, armed with camera phones.

Twitter user Craig Jenner was one of the first to put a picture on Twitter which was shared far and wide.

What happened next is indicative of the way the media are increasingly playing catch-up on such stories, moving from reporting to aggregating (or curating, if you must) - images, eye-witness accounts and videos. Journalists were asking to use the picture with a credit and were trying to get Jenner on the phone...

For most of us, we can absorb this continual stream of antisocial programming and not be affected by it. We still know what's right and wrong. But in a world where it’s the “black swan” outliers that grab the news headlines, we have to think about the consequences that reach beyond the mainstream.  When we abandon the moral purpose of stories and focus just on their entertainment aspect, are we also abandoning a commonly understood value landscape?

If you’re looking for absolute answers, you won’t find them here. That’s just not the world we live in. And am I naïve when I say the stories we chose to tell may have an influence on isolated violent events like what happened in Orlando? Perhaps. Despite all our best intentions, Omar Mateen might still have gone horribly offside.

But all things and all people are, to some extent, products of their environment. And because we in media and advertising are storytellers, we set that cultural environment. That’s our job. Because of this, I believe we have a moral obligation. We have to start paying more attention to the stories we tell....