Part 8 of 8: Why Engagement Metrics Are the Wrong Place to Start

Engagement metrics are seductive. Likes, shares, comments, and reach are easy to count, easy to visualize, and easy to compare. Social media platforms foreground these indicators, and analytic dashboards often reinforce the impression that higher numbers signal better communication.

For local governments, however, starting with engagement metrics risks misunderstanding both the purpose and the consequences of public communication. Research across public administration and communication studies consistently cautions that engagement is an incomplete—and sometimes misleading—proxy for effectiveness.

To evaluate government social media responsibly, metrics must follow mission, not the other way around.

What Engagement Metrics Actually Measure

At their core, engagement metrics measure visible interaction. They capture moments when users choose to publicly react, respond, or redistribute content. What they do not measure is equally important: comprehension, trust, learning, compliance, or long-term legitimacy.

Research on municipal social media use highlights this gap. Authors have shown that high engagement does not necessarily correspond to strategic communication outcomes. Others emphasize that interaction metrics privilege platform logics over institutional goals.

This mismatch is particularly problematic in public-sector contexts, where many communicative successes are intentionally quiet. A clearly understood service delay, a corrected misunderstanding, or a calmly received policy update may generate little interaction while achieving its intended effect.

Engagement Is Outcome-Dependent, Not Universal

One of the central insights from this series is that different communication goals produce different engagement signatures. Broadcast messages prioritize clarity and reach; corrective messages aim to halt misinformation; community-oriented posts invite affiliation; storytelling fosters meaning and belonging.

As we have written about, engagement often reflects surface cues rather than substantive impact. Joyful posts attract interaction because they invite social signaling. Visually polished posts draw attention because they cue authority. Neither necessarily indicates improved understanding.

From a research perspective, this means engagement should be treated as diagnostic, not evaluative. Low engagement may indicate failure—or it may indicate success, depending on intent.

The Risk of Metric-Driven Communication

When engagement metrics become primary performance indicators, they can distort communication behavior. Research warns that institutions may begin to optimize for interaction at the expense of clarity, neutrality, or inclusiveness.

In commercial settings, this tradeoff may be acceptable. In government communication, it is not. Incentivizing affective or sensational content risks undermining public trust, particularly when emotional resonance substitutes for informational completeness.

As discussed in our earlier posts on visuals and storytelling, non-substantive cues are powerful precisely because they operate quickly and effectively. Over-reliance on engagement metrics can unintentionally reward these cues while penalizing careful, restrained communication.

Measurement Challenges in Government Contexts

We identify several structural challenges that complicate measurement in government social media:

• Lack of clear goals, particularly when multiple departments share accounts

• Resource constraints, limiting capacity for qualitative assessment

• Fear of misinterpretation, discouraging experimentation

• Platform misalignment, where available metrics do not map onto institutional missions

These challenges are not failures of implementation, but features of public-sector communication environments. As a result, effective measurement often requires moving beyond platform-native metrics toward mission-aligned indicators, including off-platform outcomes such as reduced call volume, increased service uptake, or improved compliance.

From Metrics to Meaning

A more productive approach begins by asking a different question: What is this communication meant to accomplish? Only then does it make sense to ask how success should be assessed.

This shift reframes metrics as tools rather than targets. Engagement may be relevant for community-building initiatives but irrelevant for emergency alerts. Reach may matter more than reaction. In some cases, the absence of controversy or confusion may be the most meaningful indicator of success.

Learning Without Ranking

Comparative analysis can support better measurement practices, but only if it avoids ranking and competition. Comparing engagement numbers across jurisdictions without context obscures differences in audience size, political culture, and institutional role.

Tools such as GovFeeds are most valuable when used to identify patterns rather than winners—helping practitioners see how similar messages perform across contexts and prompting questions about purpose, tone, and structure rather than raw performance. Perhaps most importantly, such tools provide the peer-based evidence practitioners need to defend their work when leadership questions why engagement numbers don’t match expectations—allowing them to demonstrate that quality, not just quantity, matters.

Used this way, metrics become a starting point for inquiry, not an endpoint.

Engagement as a Byproduct, Not a Goal

Across this series, a consistent theme has emerged: effective government communication is defined by alignment—between tone and purpose, visuals and substance, storytelling and accountability, measurement and mission.

Engagement often follows from this alignment, but it should not drive it. When governments communicate clearly, ethically, and consistently, interaction may increase—but even when it does not, communication can still succeed.

As social media continues to function as civic infrastructure, the challenge is not to maximize engagement, but to maximize public value. That requires restraint, reflection, and a willingness to treat metrics as indicators to be interpreted rather than scores to be chased. It also requires having credible evidence to point to when explaining these principles to councils, leadership, and stakeholders—evidence that validates the professional judgment communications professionals bring to their work every day.

Concluding the Series

This series of posts (8 in total!) has argued that research-informed social media practice in local government requires more than adopting effective tactics. It requires understanding communication as a form of governance—one shaped by evidence, judgment, and democratic responsibility. Most importantly, it requires communications professionals who can explain, defend, and stand behind their strategic choices with confidence, grounded in research and peer-based data that validates their expertise.