Guide · For local-government communicators

What should we post this month?

Most local-government content calendars are built from habit and whatever the departments send over. That’s not a criticism — it’s what happens when one person covers communications for a whole community. But we can now say, from 614,909 posts across 3,745 governments, which kinds of posts residents actually engage with and forward. Here is the shape of a month that works.

Topic is the biggest lever you control

Across 23,167 municipality-months, the ranking of content topics by engagement is remarkably stable no matter what size community you serve.

Infrastructure & Planning is the standout in every population band, and the most-forwarded topic of all: 65% of those posts earn at least one share (median 2 shares — the only topic above one). Road work, water main projects, construction phases, long-range plans. This is the content residents treat as genuinely useful and pass to their neighbors — and it is chronically under-supplied, sitting at roughly 8% of the average calendar.

Public Safety (58% share rate) and local Business (57%) and Community Engagement (56%) follow closely. These are your workhorses.

At the other end: Government Information & Boards — meeting notices, agendas, procedural announcements — is the second-most-posted category at around 15% of the calendar, and near the bottom on engagement. Other/Miscellaneous runs as high as 24% of the calendar in small towns.

The mismatch in one line: about a third of the average calendar goes to the weakest topics, while the strongest are the most under-supplied. You do not need to post more. You need to shift the mix.

How much to post depends on your size

There is no universal right number, and advice that gives you one is guessing. Typical volume scales with population:

• Small town (under 10,000): about 13 posts a month, roughly 3 a week.
• Mid-size city (10,000–50,000): about 20 a month, 4–5 a week.
• Large city or county (50,000+): about 29 a month, 6–7 a week.

And more is not automatically better — the over-posting penalty is real and it lands hardest on small towns. Pushing toward daily posting in a small community roughly halves per-post engagement. If you are a one-person shop, that is permission to stop feeling behind.

Rhythm beats volume

Consistency — how many weeks you actually showed up — matters more than the monthly total. A page that posts three times every week builds a more reliable audience than one that posts twelve times in a burst and goes quiet, and that audience is what you need on the day there’s a boil-water advisory.

The weekend is wide open

The single cheapest win in the data. The weekend carries only about 12% of all local-government posts, but Saturday and Sunday out-perform weekdays — for a large government, the median Sunday post out-earns the median weekday post by half again.

Crucially, this holds inside every content theme: a public-safety post, an events post, and an infrastructure post all do measurably better on a weekend than the same kind of post midweek. So it isn’t an artifact of what happens to get posted when — there is simply less competing in the feed and residents are scrolling on their own time.

Move one high-value post into the weekend each week. That’s the whole change.

A month that works

For a mid-size city, roughly 16–20 posts:

• Weekly: one infrastructure or project update with real stakes (“Phase 2 of Main St. begins Monday — here’s the detour”), one public-safety item, one community or business spotlight.
• Each weekend: one high-value anchor — a parks or trail post, an event recap with photos, an adoptable pet. Low-cost, high-share.
• As needed: the procedural notices. Post them, but stop letting them set the tone of the page — they are obligations, not your content strategy.
• Monthly: one piece of genuine transparency — budget explainer, project progress, a decision and why it was made. These build the trust you draw on in a crisis.

The full research

Every figure here comes from our own published analysis, with methodology and caveats: What an Engaging Month of Municipal Social Media Actually Looks Like (23,167 municipality-months, split into three population bands) and What Local Governments Should Post on Facebook. For timing specifically, see the best time for cities to post.