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Guide · For local-government communicators

“How do we compare to other cities?” — how to answer it credibly

Sooner or later a council member, a manager, or a board chair asks the question. It is usually asked casually and answered badly — with a follower count, a screenshot of a good month, or an honest “I’m not sure.” None of those land, and the last one quietly costs you the budget conversation later. Here is how to answer it in a way that holds up.

The short version. Compare against governments your size, report medians rather than averages, lead with shares over raw follower counts, and give them one page they can read in ninety seconds. The goal is not to prove you’re winning — it’s to make your work legible to people who don’t do it.

Why the obvious answers fail

Follower count is the metric leadership already knows, which is exactly why it’s dangerous. It mostly measures how long your page has existed and how big your community is. A town of 4,000 will never beat a city of 90,000 on followers, and saying so out loud sounds like an excuse.

Your best post proves nothing. Every page has a viral outlier — a lost dog, a snow day, a retiring officer. In our data the average engagement per post runs several times the median, precisely because a handful of posts distort it. Lead with an outlier and you’ve set a baseline you cannot repeat next quarter.

Raw totals with no comparison — “we got 14,000 interactions” — leave your audience with no idea whether that is good. A number without a peer set is not evidence; it’s trivia.

The four things worth reporting

  1. Engagement per post, as a median, against same-size peers. This is the core number. Median rather than mean, because one viral post shouldn’t decide the story. Against same-size peers, because that’s the only comparison that survives a follow-up question.
  2. Your share rate. Across local government, roughly 56% of posts earn at least one share while only about 34% earn a comment. Residents forward civic information more than they debate it — so shares are the closest thing you have to a “this was useful” vote, and they extend reach beyond your own followers. Leadership intuitively understands “residents passed this along.”
  3. Consistency, not volume. How many weeks you actually posted matters more than a monthly total. A steady weekly rhythm is what builds the audience that’s there when you need it during an emergency.
  4. One thing you changed and what happened. A single before/after — moved the parks post to Saturday, engagement doubled — does more for your credibility than a page of statistics. It shows you are steering, not just posting.

Compare like with like

The single biggest credibility upgrade is picking the right peer set. “We’re above average for cities our size in this state” is a defensible sentence. “We’re behind Austin” is a meaningless one.

Population band matters enormously. In our analysis of 23,167 municipality-months, posting volume alone scales steeply with size: a typical small town (under 10,000) posts around 13 times a month, a mid-size city (10,000–50,000) about 20, and a large city or county (50,000+) roughly 29. Engagement scales too. Comparing across those bands tells you nothing except how big the places are.

A word on rankings. Resist the urge to turn this into a leaderboard. The useful question is never “are we beating the next town over” — it’s “what are governments like ours doing that works, and should we borrow it?” Framing your report as competition invites a council member to ask why you’re not first. Framing it as learning invites them to ask how they can help.

What a monthly report should look like

One page. Ninety seconds of reading. In practice:

  • A plain-language summary sentence at the top — what happened this month and what it means.
  • Your volume and median engagement, next to the peer median for your size and state.
  • Your three best posts, with why each worked.
  • A content-mix breakdown, so leadership sees the range of work rather than assuming it’s all festival photos.
  • One recommendation for next month.

Subscribers tell us this is the artifact that travels furthest — it gets forwarded to managers and boards, and it turns “what does our communications person do all day” into a visible answer. You can read a real monthly report here (shared with permission) to see the structure.

If the honest answer is “we’re doing well”

Say so, with the number attached. High performers routinely undersell themselves because they assume good news isn’t worth reporting. It is — a manager who learns their city is in the top 10% of the state on engagement now has something to be proud of in public, and you have made the case for keeping the budget without ever asking for it directly.

Get the comparison without building it by hand. GovFeeds benchmarks your accounts against real peer governments by state and population band, and generates the monthly report for you. See it in the two-minute tour, or see plans from $80/month.

The research behind this

The figures here come from our own published analysis: what an engaging month looks like across 23,167 municipality-months, and why local governments get shared more than they get commented on. Both include full methodology.

Walk in with the peer numbers already in hand.

Benchmark your accounts against governments your size, and get a board-ready report every month.

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