The Most Shared Facebook Content 2017. The Top Viral Posts, Videos, and Articles

To answer this question we reviewed two billion articles and Facebook posts that were published this year. We set out our findings below, including:

• The content (articles, videos, and blog posts) that were most shared on Facebook 
• The viral Facebook posts that gained the most engagement
• Expert reflections on the findings and the lessons for content marketers

Reality check for the rest of us: These top articles and posts were exceptional outliers and we cannot expect to replicate their success. However, we can learn from them to gain deeper insights into the kinds of content that engage Facebook audiences. In this post, we discuss the implications for content creators with commentary from marketing and publishing experts.

The two tables below show the most shared content on Facebook and the top viral Facebook posts this year. The links to the content items are in the discussion of the articles after the table.

Most Shared Content On Facebook 2017

As we can see below Facebook audiences readily share entertaining, inspiring and heart-warming content published outside the platform. Music videos topped the charts this year with three of the top ten posts. We can also observe a strong tribal element when it comes to the sharing of political and opinion content. There were two political posts in the top ten.

The Most Viral Facebook Posts  2017

When it comes to Facebook posts the top posts were almost exclusively videos. Only three of the top 20 posts were not videos. The most popular topics were:

• Practical hacks (5 of the top 10 posts were practical tips)
• Awesome and inspiring content
• Food and recipes (5 of the top 25 posts were food posts)
• Cute animals
• Music videos

Four of the top 20 most shared Facebook posts were in Spanish. One of the top 20 posts was in French.

For a detailed analysis of the most engaging videos see our previous analysis of 100m Facebook videos.