Hiru News vs Newsfirst vs Ada Derana on Facebook

20 September 2026 · 8 min read · Analysis by SWORD AI

Facebook page analysis of Sri Lanka's three biggest news pages: 3,112 posts from Hiru News, Newsfirst and Ada Derana over 7 days, compared on reactions per follower, comments, shares and hit rate.

Three pages dominate Facebook news in Sri Lanka, and they are close enough in size for a fair fight: Hiru News (3.6M followers), Newsfirst (3.0M) and Ada Derana's Sinhala page (2.7M). This Facebook page analysis covers every public post the three made over the same seven days, 13 to 20 September 2026 - 3,112 posts in all. The page with the most followers came last, and the page that posted most came last too.

Sri Lanka news pages on Facebook: the week in numbers

Page	Followers	Posts	Per day	Avg reactions	Median	Avg comments	Avg shares
Newsfirst	3.0M	832	119	1,365	185	108	81
Ada Derana	2.7M	905	129	727	148	66	46
Hiru News	3.6M	1,375	196	716	90	82	38

Newsfirst wins on engagement, not volume

Hiru News posted 196 times a day across the week, Ada Derana 129 and Newsfirst 119. Yet an average Newsfirst post pulled 1,365 reactions, nearly double either rival, from barely 60% of Hiru's output.

Follower counts do not predict engagement

Hiru News has the biggest following of the three at 3.6M, ahead of Newsfirst's 3.0M and Ada Derana's 2.7M. It finishes last on almost every engagement measure here. Put reactions on the same footing - per post, per 100,000 followers - and the order inverts against follower count entirely.

An average Newsfirst post earns 45.5 reactions for every 100,000 followers, more than twice what Hiru News gets from the same-sized audience. Hiru carries 900,000 more followers than Ada Derana and converts fewer of them per post.

Volume does claw some of that back over a full week. Across all seven days, Hiru pulled 27,343 reactions per 100,000 followers to Ada Derana's 24,377, because it published 470 more posts. It buys its way past Ada Derana on totals while losing on every per-post measure.

How much of each following is actually awake

Facebook publishes a second audience number next to the follower count: how many people engaged with the page in the past week. It is the honest version of a follower count, and the three pages separate sharply on it.

Newsfirst has the smaller following but the larger active audience: 1.6M people engaged in the week, 55% of its followers, against 1.4M (39%) for Hiru News and 0.9M (33%) for Ada Derana. On paper Hiru leads by 600,000 followers; in practice Newsfirst reaches more people.

Ada Derana is the most consistent page

Ada Derana and Hiru News look level on averages - 727 against 716 - but averages are the wrong tool. Ada Derana's median post takes 148 reactions against Hiru's 90, and it reaches that with 470 fewer posts. A typical Ada Derana post does substantially better than a typical Hiru post; Hiru's average is propped up by its biggest hits.

The concentration numbers say the same thing. The top 10% of posts carry 80% of all reactions at Hiru News, against 69% at both Newsfirst and Ada Derana. Hiru publishes more than anyone and depends more than anyone on a handful of posts landing.

Facebook reaction mix: a third of Hiru's engagement is laughter

Facebook's reaction buttons say more than a like count does. On Hiru News, 31.9% of all reactions across the week were Haha. On Newsfirst it is 25.2%, on Ada Derana 19.6%. That is political news being laughed at, not mourned or celebrated.

Newsfirst earns the most affection: 15.7% Love, against 10.8% for Ada Derana and 10.5% for Hiru. Ada Derana draws the straightest profile of the three, with the highest plain-Like share at 63.5%.

Percentages flatter the smaller feed, though. In actual laughs per post, Newsfirst leads again with 344 Haha reactions on an average post, ahead of Hiru's 228 and Ada Derana's 142.

Who gets argued with, who gets forwarded

Reactions are cheap. Comments take effort and shares take endorsement, so measuring both per 1,000 reactions shows what kind of attention each page earns rather than how much.

Hiru News is the argument page: 114 comments per 1,000 reactions, the most of the three, which fits a feed where a third of reactions are Haha. Ada Derana is the forwarding page: 63 shares per 1,000 reactions, the highest of the three, and the only one where shares come close to comments.

Hit rate: how often a Facebook post actually lands

Averages say what a page gets; hit rate says how reliably it gets it. Here is the share of each page's posts that cleared 1,000 reactions, against the share that failed to reach ten.

Nearly one in four Newsfirst posts clears a thousand reactions, against one in seven at Ada Derana and one in nine at Hiru News. Flops are rare everywhere at this level - 1.4% of posts at Newsfirst and Ada Derana, 3.4% at Hiru - which is what separates these three from smaller pages, where most posts sink without trace.

The best time to post on Facebook in Sri Lanka

Pooling all three pages, 22:00 Sri Lanka time is the strongest hour at 1,527 reactionson an average post, with noon second at 1,358. Two smaller peaks sit at 19:00 (1,058) and 07:00 (1,050). The dead hours are 23:00 (418) and 15:00 (509).

The 22:00 and 23:00 gap is the striking part: one hour apart, and a post published at ten in the evening averages more than three times what an eleven o'clock post gets. These pages post around the clock, so this reflects when Sri Lankan audiences are actually on Facebook rather than a scheduling experiment - but the shape is consistent enough to plan around.

One story beat every page this week

Rumesh Tharanga's javelin world title was the week's biggest story on two of the three pages: it took Hiru News 42,351 reactions and Ada Derana 26,725, each page's best of the week. Newsfirst led with the Namal Rajapaksa story instead - 41,246 reactions and 6,140 comments, the most-commented post anywhere in this set.

What this means for your own Facebook page

• Follower count is a vanity number. Hiru News leads on followers (3.6M) and trails on reactions per post, per follower and per week engaged.
• Posting more is not the lever. Hiru out-posts Newsfirst by 65% and gets half the reactions per post.
• Use medians, not averages. Ada Derana and Hiru look identical on averages; the median says Ada Derana's typical post does 64% better.
• Check the reaction mix. Volume that is a third Haha is not the same kind of attention as volume that is mostly Like and Love.
• Watch the hour, not just the day. A post at 22:00 averaged three times what the same pages got at 23:00.

Method: how we analysed a week of posts

Every public post from the three pages inside the same seven-day window, 13 to 20 September 2026, pulled with SWORD AI on 20 September 2026: 1,375 posts from Hiru News, 905 from Ada Derana and 832 from Newsfirst - 3,112 posts in total. Reactions, comments and shares are as Facebook reported them at the time of collection, and engagement on recent posts keeps growing after that. Pages analysed: Hiru News (3.6M followers), Newsfirst (3.0M) and Ada Derana's Sinhala page (2.7M). Follower counts and the weekly engaged-people figure are Facebook's own, read from each page on the collection date, so per-follower rates use those. Ada Derana's separate English page is a much smaller audience and is not included here. Only publicly visible page content was used.