[Tweet “IFLscience.com had the highest average shares per post on the internet in May via @BuzzSumo”]

The picture here is very different. Since the entry level was just 100 articles, we’ve opened the floodgates to a diverse range of smaller publishers and the major players have vanished. On average they produced just 463 articles during May. So it’s unlikely they could keep up these numbers if they started producing as much content as our major publishers, who published an average of 13,432 articles over the same period.

Nevertheless, IFLscience achieved a huge average of 22,557 shares per post over 450 articles. The runners-up are also a lot closer. Bored Panda, a site that allows anyone to upload content, came in a close second with 19,825 shares and Disney also did exceptionally well.

The Importance of Facebook

For both of the above charts, Facebook completely overshadowed the other networks. To the point where the other networks were almost entirely irrelevant to the overall rankings. Put another way, if we sorted by average Facebook shares & likes instead of the total of all shares (Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Pinterest & Google+) the positions remained almost identical.

This may not come as much of a surprise. For a start Facebook is by far the largest social network. It’s also probably fair to say some of the sites above are more well known for their Facebook page’s than they are their websites.

For example, IFLscience is not really a major publisher or brand, yet their Facebook page has an incredible 20 million+ likes. Double that of BuzzFeed & the Huffington Post combined. Clearly their content and style resonates on Facebook.

Facebook page Number of page likes facebook.com/Disney 46 million+ facebook.com/IFeakingLoveScience 20 million+ facebook.com/LADbible 10 million+ facebook.com/BuzzFeed 5 million+ facebook.com/HuffingtonPost 5 million+

Key Takeaway

Facebook’s size and potential to drive huge traffic means ignoring it is probably a bad idea. A popular Facebook page can drive an enormous amount of traffic and shares. But it’d be naive to conclude that the other networks are worthless. In fact as analyzed below, often the other networks are often more important for particular brands and niches.

The Most Shared Brands

What constitutes a “brand” in this context is quite subjective and compiling this list required some manual filtering. We wanted to exclude big publishers and instead focus on the brands who are actively engaging in content marketing for their business. Therefore we didn’t want to include domains where the product pages had attracted more shares & likes than editorial content, as these will often be driven by paid promotion.

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