🏆 MediaRank UK National News: Facebook 2026

The landscape for news publishers on Facebook has undergone a dramatic transformation over the past year.

After a prolonged period marked by declining referral traffic and Meta’s explicit deprioritisation of hard news, 2025 ushered in a surprising resurgence in engagement. While the platform continues to prioritise AI-driven recommendations and short-form video content, many major news organisations are now reporting substantial growth in on-platform interactions.

Analysis shows a significant engagement rebound between 2024 and 2025, with total interactions for top news publishers increasing by as much as 200%. And although this growth is mainly driven by US publishers, the same upward trend has been observable in the UK and has continued into 2026.

Currently, Facebook’s algorithm specifically favors meaningful interactions, prioritising content that generates shares and long-form commentary over passive likes. Many publishers are using the current surge in Facebook activity as a funnel to drive users toward their own apps and newsletters, thereby mitigating the risks of future algorithmic volatility.

Facebook’s deprioritisation of link posts has led to publishers growing more and more sophisticated on social media. The success of news content, therefore, is currently driven by a mix of formats. Among the most important of these formats for engagement has been image-link posting whereby article URLs are added in the comments.

Facebook is still a vital, though inherently volatile, pillar of the news distribution ecosystem. While this increase in engagement is a welcome development for the industry, the most resilient publishers are those utilising this window to build direct relationships with their audience. By treating the platform as a tool for discovery rather than a final destination, organisations can better protect themselves against the inevitable fluctuations of social media algorithms.

Publisher Ranking 2026

Our research represents a comparative performance audit of the biggest news publishers in the UK with over a million followers on their main Facebook Page. This involves gathering raw interaction data (likes, comments, reshares) to determine which publishers are successfully engaging their followers.

The engagement rate shows the percentage of followers who engage with a publisher’s Facebook posts. It is calculated as the sum of engagements on each post divided by the number of followers, then divided by the number of days in the period analysed — in this case one year (January 1st 2025 - January 1st 2026).

The engagement rate is the most representative public metric for measuring performance of publishers on social media.

Below we present the engagement rates achieved by the top UK publishers as of January 2026.

The findings present several clear outliers: At the top of the rankings, the Daily Express sees more than double the engagement rate of the next highest publisher — indeed, its engagement rate is almost as much as the second-, third- and fourth-placed publishers combined.

At the other end of the rankings, BBC News has far and away the lowest engagement rate of all major news publishers in the UK — less than half the next lowest performer.

To get a clearer indication of the direction of travel in engagement rate, we look at the percentage change in the year between January 1st 2025 and January 1st 2026.

Taken in tandem with the engagement rates detailed above, these figures show the overall good health of many publishers’ Facebook presence. The average rate of engagement growth for the publishers studied was 423%. These studies are, however, skewed by the extraordinary figures achieved by both The Independent and The Times and The Sunday Times Pages over the course of the year. Removing these outliers brings the average down to a still respectable 197%. 

At the other end of the rankings, three publishers, The Mirror, The Sun and the Daily Mail, actually saw a decline in engagement during 2025, although the engagement rates for The Sun and The Mirror remain higher.

While the broader UK media landscape saw a resurgence in social interaction throughout 2025, the 2026 MediaRank audit reveals a stark divide between publishers who have mastered the new "engagement economy" and those who have struggled.