What Local Governments Should Post on Facebook (667,000 Posts, Ranked by Engagement)
“What should we post?” is the question every local-government communicator gets stuck on. So we measured it. Across 667,000+ public posts from 5,000+ U.S. cities and counties, some content themes earn two to three times the engagement of others — and the single most-common type of post is one of the least engaging. Here’s the ranking, and what to do with it.
The ranking: which themes actually drive engagement
The typical local-government post earns a median of 6 engagements. But that average hides a wide spread by topic. Tangible, local, human content — infrastructure projects, public safety, community events, local economic news — consistently outperforms. Procedural content underperforms.
Median engagement by content theme
Median engagement (reactions + comments + shares) per post, by theme. n = 667,000+ posts with measured engagement.
The trap: governments post the most of what engages the least
Here’s the finding that should change your content calendar. “Government Information & Boards” — meeting agendas, notices, procedural updates, board announcements — is the second-largest share of everything local governments post (about 14% of all posts), yet it sits near the bottom of the engagement ranking (median 4, a third below the all-post median). Health & Wellness messaging lands lowest of all (median 3).
Meanwhile Infrastructure & Planning — road and water projects, construction updates, development decisions — tops the list at a median of 9, half again above average, despite being a smaller slice of what gets posted. The pattern is clear: residents engage with the concrete things that affect their street and their week, more than with the machinery of government itself.
What the top posts look like
The highest-engagement posts in each top theme are tangible and local — a development decision residents care about, a community event, a moment of civic pride. A few real examples from the data:
- Infrastructure & Planning — the City of Cleveland, OH announcing it had rejected a permit for a proposed data center drew ~9,200 engagements: a concrete local decision with real stakes.
- Events & Community Activities — a City of Columbia, SC welcome event and a City of Macon, GA MLK Day march each drew tens of thousands of engagements — community moments people want to be part of.
- Public Safety — storm response, road closures, and recognition posts (a long-serving officer’s retirement) reliably over-index.
How to use this
- Lead with the tangible. Infrastructure, public safety, events, and local economic news are your engagement engine. Give them your best slots and your best visuals.
- Don’t let procedural posts crowd the feed. Board notices and agendas still matter for transparency — but they’re reference content, not engagement content. Package them with a human hook, or route them to where people look for them rather than flooding the main feed.
- Benchmark against your real peers, not a national average. Your community’s mix is its own. The useful question is what’s working for governments like yours — same size, same region — which is exactly what GovFeeds is built to show.