Video Earns Local Governments 2–3× the Engagement. It’s 2% of What They Post.
Ask a room of PIOs about video and you get a shrug and a story. Someone made a polished council-meeting recap and it sank. Someone else posted thirty seconds of a snowplow and it went further than anything they published all year. So we measured it across 708,415 posts from 4,773 city and county governments — and the shrug turns out to be hiding two findings that point in opposite directions.
- Video posts earn a median 16 interactions vs 5 for everything else — a 3.2× difference.
- It isn’t a big-city effect. Comparing each government to itself, video still wins by 2.1×, and it wins in 73% of governments.
- Yet video is only 2.3% of the median calendar, and 32% of governments posted none at all.
- The catch: video does nothing for procedural content (a 1.0× lift on meeting and board posts) — and that is exactly where governments put the most of it.
In this report: How little video gets posted · What it’s worth · The same-government test · Where it pays — and where it doesn’t · What to do · How we measured it
Almost nobody is posting video
Across governments with at least 30 posts in the year we studied, the median video share of the calendar was 2.3%. Roughly one post in forty.
Governments with 30+ posts, June 2025 – June 2026. n = 3,988.
That is changing, but slowly. Video went from 4.0% of all local-government posts in mid-2025 to 7.9% a year later — roughly doubling, and still a rounding error next to how much text and photo content goes out.
What a video post is worth
Across the full year, the gap is not subtle:
Medians across 708,415 posts; 50,093 of them video.
The obvious objection is size: bigger governments have communications staff, staff make video, and bigger governments get more engagement anyway. So we split by population band — and the advantage barely moves. Small towns 2.5×, mid-size cities 2.5×, large governments 2.6×. Whatever is happening, it is not a big-city artifact.
The test that matters: each government against itself
Comparing towns to other towns still leaves room for doubt — maybe the governments that post video are simply better at communications generally. So we ran the strictest comparison available: for every government that posted at least 5 videos and at least 20 non-video posts, we compared its own video engagement to its own everything-else engagement. Same page, same followers, same staff, same community.
Across 1,735 governments:
- The median government earned 2.13× more on its video posts.
- Video won in 73% of governments; it lost in 23%.
- The pattern is overwhelmingly unlikely to be chance (Wilcoxon signed-rank, p < 0.001).
Split by size, the advantage holds everywhere but is least reliable for the smallest places: small towns see a 1.81× median lift with video winning in 61% of cases, mid-size cities 2.38× (73%), and large governments 2.11× (79%). If you run a small-town page, video is a good bet — but it is a bet, not a guarantee, and roughly two in five small towns don’t see the lift.
Where video pays — and where it absolutely doesn’t
This is the part worth pinning above your desk. We compared video against non-video within each content topic, so a parks video is measured against a parks photo, not against a boil-water notice.
Median interactions per post, video vs everything else, within each topic. Topics with 200+ video posts.
Read the last row again. For meeting notices, agendas, and board content, video buys you nothing at all — a median of 4 either way. Filming a council meeting recap does not make a council meeting recap interesting.
And here is the uncomfortable part. That zero-return category has the highest video share of any topic: 11.3% of its posts are video, against 4.8% for public safety and 7.7% for parks. Governments are concentrating their scarcest, most expensive content format precisely where it returns nothing, while the categories that pay 6× go under-filmed.
If you have ever produced a careful meeting recap video and watched it disappear, the data says the problem was not your camera work.
What to do with this
- Move video off the agenda posts. If you are making one video a month and it is a meeting recap, you are spending your most expensive format on your lowest-return content. Point it at parks, public safety, and animals instead.
- Thirty seconds on a phone counts. Nothing in this data rewards production value — it rewards being video. The snowplow, the new playground, the K-9 unit, the adoptable dog. These are walk-outside-and-film moments, not projects.
- Two a month would put you in the top 15%. Over 15% video share is the top band nationally, and the median government is at 2.3%. The bar is embarrassingly low.
- Expect it to work about three times in four. Video wins in 73% of governments, not 100%. If your first two videos land flat, that is within the normal range — check what you filmed before concluding video doesn’t work for your community.
- Watch what peers film. The 6× categories are the ones residents want to see rather than read. Before your next one, look at what has actually worked for governments your size.
How we measured this
Nothing here relies on private analytics — every number comes from posts any resident could see.
/videos/, /reel/, or /watch) — 50,093 posts, 7.1% of the sample. Everything else is the comparison group. We report medians, not averages, because engagement is heavily skewed: a handful of viral posts pull the mean far above what a typical post earns. Governments were matched to Census population and split into three bands (under 10k, 10k–50k, 50k+), joining 98% of posts. The same-government test used the 1,735 governments with at least 5 video and 20 non-video posts, comparing each government’s own medians and testing the paired difference with a Wilcoxon signed-rank test. Topics come from our automated content classifier and are compared within topic. One measurement check worth stating: engagement was successfully captured for 78.3% of video posts and 77.1% of everything else, so the gap is not an artifact of video posts being measured more often.
Frequently asked questions
Does video really get more engagement for local government?
Yes, substantially. Across 708,415 posts from 4,773 governments, video earned a median 16 interactions per post versus 5 for everything else — 3.2×. The advantage holds within every population band (2.5–2.6×) and survives the strictest test: comparing each government to its own non-video posts, the median lift is still 2.13×, and video wins in 73% of governments.
How much video should a city post on Facebook?
More than almost anyone does. The median government devotes just 2.3% of its calendar to video, and 32% post none at all. Sustaining more than 15% would place you in the top 14% of governments nationally. Two short videos a month is a realistic target for a one-person shop and would put most pages well above the median.
Why did my council meeting video get no engagement?
Because video does not help that kind of content. Within the “Government Information & Boards” topic — meeting notices, agendas, board business — video posts earn a median of 4 interactions and non-video posts also earn 4. A 1.0× lift. It is also the single most over-filmed topic, at 11.3% video. The format was not the problem; the subject was.
What kind of video works best for cities and counties?
Parks and recreation (6.2× versus non-video in the same topic), public safety and police (6.1×), animal services (5.8×), and library and education (4.5×). The pattern is visual, human, and happening — things residents would rather watch than read about. Infrastructure also does well at 3.9×, which is useful because it is the topic residents share most.
See what’s working in communities like yours.
Search what 5,000+ peer governments actually posted — by topic, by population band, ranked by what landed.