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Engagement rates for the UK public sector

Benchmark your organisations social media engagement rates

Last updated: 29 April 2026
8 min read

Understand how your content stacks up against the average engagement rate for your sector and find out where you rank.

With the start of the new financial year looming, you might be thinking that it’s time to revamp your social media strategies, set new targets and work out what ‘great engagement’ actually looks like. And what better way to start than by taking a look back at all your social media content from the last year? It’s likely that this content will inform your next strategy, but the question is, how do you know what those figures actually mean? Is a 2% engagement rate too low? Is 5% actually really good? Or, what is an engagement rate? This is where benchmarking comes in. When you can compare how your results stack up against sector averages, you can really start to see if your content is facilitating conversations, or if your social media presence needs a little bit of work to help encourage a two way conversation that will ultimately lead to higher levels of trust in your community.

To make this step as easy as possible for you, we’ve rounded up average social media engagement rates from over 400 public sector organisations that we work with for Facebook, X, Instagram, LinkedIn and Nextdoor for different areas of the public sector including; bluelight, central government, charities, education, healthcare, housing, local government, transport and utilities. We’ve also combined all these averages into one public sector engagement rate list, so you can compare across the board. 

If you’re interested in how else your content ranks amongst other competitors, our benchmarking tool add-on means you’ll be able to build your very own dashboard and compare your stats with other organisations, from average engagement rates, volume of posts, follower growth and media types used.

Average Engagement Rates

Bluelight

Facebook: 1.35%

X: 2.54%

Instagram: 5.55%

LinkedIn: 3.77%

Nextdoor: 59.56%

Central Government

Facebook: 4.84%

X: 2.15%

Instagram: 4.34%

LinkedIn: 4.21%

Local Government

Facebook: 1.62%

X: 1.96%

Instagram: 5.09%

LinkedIn: 3.69%

Nextdoor: 2.32%

Charities

Facebook: 3.31%

X: 3.09%

Instagram: 5.78%

LinkedIn: 5.63%

Education

Facebook: 1.76%

X: 2.16%

Instagram: 9%

LinkedIn: 3.92%

Healthcare

Facebook: 2.67%

X: 2.64%

Instagram: 4.69%

LinkedIn: 4.41%

Nextdoor: 0.3%

Housing

Facebook: 2.13%

X: 2.84%

Instagram: 4.13%

LinkedIn: 4.33%

Transport

Facebook: 1.71%

X: 0.81%

Instagram: 7.63%

LinkedIn: 2.41%

Utilities

Facebook: 1.54%

X: 2.47%

Instagram: 2.68%

LinkedIn: 3.81%

Overall Public Sector

Facebook: 2.09%

X: 2.27%

Instagram: 5.31%

LinkedIn: 3.96%

Nextdoor: 9.59%

Though due to a very high engagement rate in the Bluelight sector, Nextdoor comes in as the platform with the highest engagement rate meaning this might be a channel worth looking into to really connect with your local communities and audiences. Orlo is currently the only social media management and community engagement platform where Nextdoor can be integrated for some sectors.

The channel with the second highest average engagement rate is Instagram which consistently ranks highly across all sectors for engagement rate. This may be due to smaller followings on Instagram, however they are likely to be highly engaged, resulting in a larger percentage of that small follower base liking, commenting and sharing content. For example it’s likely that the Transport sector sees a lot of enthusiasts engaging with train photography or tram and bus imagery and therefore use Instagram specifically for sharing this type of content. This is an important consideration when planning where different content types should sit and what each of your social media channels should be used for.

A conversation about your goals and current challenges
A live walkthrough of the platform, relevant to your sector
Real examples from organisations like yours
A friendly, no pressured approach from someone who understands the public sector
A conversation about your goals and current challenges
A live walkthrough of the platform, relevant to your sector
Real examples from organisations like yours
A friendly, no pressured approach from someone who understands the public sector

Rosie has 8 years of experience in the world of digital marketing and social media in both B2B and B2C. Passionate about automating the tedious and using data to drive change and deliver on KPIs, it’s Rosie’s goal to make sure all of her customers understand the power of social and how Orlo can be the driver of change.

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