TikTok wobbles, Facebook rises, and other lessons from Q2

By Benedict Nicholson Director of Content NewsWhip New York, USA Connect In the first quarter (Q1) of 2025, a rise in news engagement coincided with the accession of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency once more. That was to be expected, as algorithms shifted and people switched on to the political news environment once more.Here are some lessons from the data from the second quarter (Q2) based on information from a group of 50 publishers across different platforms, including TikTok, Facebook, X, and Instagram.A TikTok dip demonstrates dangers of single platform relianceIn Q1, TikTok was the dominant platform. TikTok was the biggest driver of engagement for this group by a distance in Q1, and that remained the case in Q2, with more than 2.4 billion engagements.Despite its relative dominance, it was also TikTok that saw the biggest drop in engagement from the platforms with a reduction of 31%. This is in comparison to a drop of around 16% for its closest peer platform Instagram, and a mean reduction of engagement of 24%.TikTok was still the platform that drove the most engagement by a considerable distance, with 57% of all engagement coming from there. However, the fact it is vulnerable to such a big swing shows the danger of building a whole strategy around a single platform. The likes of ESPN and Bleacher Report, which saw billions of engagements in Q1 on the platform saw drops of between 40% and 50% each.So, what does this tell us?Diversify your content distribution: We've all lived through the rise and fall of various platforms for content distribution. This dip in TikTok engagement is a reminder there's no magic solution.Use platforms to build trust with your audience: In addition to content distribution, platform posting is about building both brand and trust. Your audience should seek you out rather than stumbling across your content.Be prepared to pivot: New platforms are constantly appearing. Have a strategy for new text-based, video-forward, or audio-focused platforms you can deploy if they start to rise in popularity. Being an early adopter can be a huge advantage.Don't discount Facebook, which quietly jumps from strength to strengthAt the beginning of the year, Facebook announced an algorithm change that looked set to boost political news on the platform. That has been true. It's also seen Fox News turn into a big winner with its engagement.But it's not just Fox News; engagement on Facebook was actually the only platform that increased overall compared to Q1, with a modest but unique 6% rise compared to drops on every other platform.There are also whispers that this positive engagement shift on the platform may be correlated with an increase in referral traffic from the platform, as reported by Digiday in April.Even when compared with Instagram - one of the platforms of the moment, which is generally the highest driver of interactions outside of TikTok - it's basically a coin flip whether publishers are receiving more engagement there or on Facebook. From the sampling of 50 publishers, exactly 25 had more engagement on Facebook versus 25 on Instagram.This is ultimately a continuation of the previous point: In the same way platforms can see big drops in engagement, they can also see big resurgences, and that's exactly what Facebook is going through right now. If your audience is still there, activate it!But what's currently working on the platform?Political content dominates, so if you've got it, use it: The likes of Fox perform well with political-adjacent posts, mostly about the Trump administration.Viral content still has its place: Digital-first organisations such as LADbible have mastered the art of the viral post, but more traditional legacy outlets like the Metro are also tapping into this to drive engagement.Take local stories national: Cable news channels, in particular, saw success taking local stories and broadcasting them to a larger audience. ABC News and CBS News are getting a lot of engagement from this tactic.Right now, video is working: If it feels as if video is everywhere right now, it's because it is! Even on Facebook, which has often seen photos and links drive a lot of engagement, video was the most common format among the top 1,000 posts.Volume alone isn't a strategy, though it helps on some platformsThere's an ongoing question over whether posting often helps to build an audience and drive engagement. While there's obviously a minimum threshold of posting required to build audience and community, it's clear it matters more on some platforms than others.Let's start with where it does matter: TikTok.This was the platform with the clearest relationship between the number of posts and engagement with those posts, with a Pearson's correlation coefficient of around 0.92.In almost every case, posting more on TikTok correlated with an increase in the amount of engagement.This wasn't true of every platform as can be seen by the graph of X, where there is a very low correlation between posting amount and engagement level.Ultimately, each platform is different. Broadly speaking, however, TikTok and Instagram had a higher correlation between posting amounts and engagement, while Facebook and X saw less of a relationship between the two.Lessons for the rest of 2025The data makes one thing clear: Social platforms remain volatile, but also full of opportunity.TikTok still delivers the lion's share of engagement, yet its sharp dip shows how risky it is to build strategy on a single channel. Facebook, meanwhile, has proven surprisingly durable, rewarding political and viral content with renewed success. And while posting more can help in certain spaces like TikTok and Instagram, it isn't a universal recipe for success.For publishers, the path forward is simply stated but harder to execute: Diversify distribution, build direct trust with audiences, and stay flexible enough to pivot when platforms shift. The platforms may keep changing, but the fundamentals of sustainable audience growth remain the same. 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About Benedict Nicholson Benedict Nicholson is director of content at NewsWhip in New York, USA. Benedict can be reached at [email protected] or @BenNicholsonNW. Related Articles The best creator-model journalists are journalists 26 August 2025 Amalie Nash Reuters Institute research details the new rules of the news ec... 2 July 2025 Paula Felps Globe and Mail leans into specificity, in-house strengths to pr... 4 June 2025 Kiran Rana Aftonbladet's Election Buddies chatbots made political news mor... 5 May 2025 Martin Schori Baseline audience reports contextualise current environment, pr... 1 May 2025 Stefan ten Teij... Interaction rate, engagement velocity are among key social enga... 27 April 2025 Chris Miles Financial Times, WSJ share the power of audience insights 5 March 2025 Paula Felps Expressen leverages TikTok strategy to grow younger audience, e... 24 February 2025 Brie Logsdon Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.