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BuzzFeed and BBC revealed as February's most-shared news sites on Facebook and Twitter

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By Gillian West, Social media manager

March 15, 2014 | 2 min read

In February BuzzFeed and the BBC were the most shared English-language publishers on Facebook and Twitter, says social monitoring platform Newswhip.

The data revealed that articles from BuzzFeed received more than 50 million interactions, such as likes, shares and comments, on Facebook, a number which Newswhip CEO and founder Paul Quigley attributes to BuzzFeed's popular quiz-style articles of recent months.

Quigley commented: "BuzzFeed haven't upped their article count so much but the social numbers on some of those quizzes, they're like a new form of content. It's almost unfair to stack them up against news content because they're evergreen, they just keep rolling and rolling around the web, living on. They may live on for years, accumulating shares."

The Huffington Post saw a rise in Facebook interactions in February, something which Quigley thinks could be attributed to is new focus on social media optimisation over SEO.

Independent Journal Review and The Blaze also saw an increase in social interactions with more people "sharing political stories they have an affiliation with".

"Facebook has been playing around with its algorithm," he said, "and they announced they were going to be emphasising quality content without really disclosing how they were going to be calculating that."

'Viral' publishers were found to achieve the strongest results in terms of the average number of interactions per article, something which Quigley cites as evidence of "new media starting to displace old media".

On Twitter the BBC has the highest number of shares, with just under 25 million in February. Mashable came in second with 14.6 million, followed by the New York Times, CNN and NBC.

Of the Twitter numbers, Quigley said: "There are different motivations for sharing and different relationships. Twitter is public, there are professional relationships mixed with personal ones there and those dynamics create a different type of sharing atmosphere and I think without Twitter you'd lose a lot of the fast reaction to news stories."

All of the data comes from Newswhip's content discovery tool Spike, which monitors the content that is shared on social media and the conversations around it.

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