A method and a system for natural language processing of digital content objects, such as news stories, which ranks named entities in digital content objects by the impact that digital content objects that mention them are having on social media, is provided. Digital content objects are scored on a per object basis based on social media activity metrics associated with that digital content object. Named entities that appear in each digital content object are also extracted through natural language analysis. The named entities are then scored on a per entity basis to obtain an entity score that the object scores of those digital content objects in which that named entity appears. An entity ranking list can be created based on the entity scores, which can then be used in various different ways. For example, the entity ranking list can be displayed on a graphical user interface.