A chance conversation a few years ago led me to explore Facebook groups and detail. What I found out showed how critically important they are to public sector communicators.
Firstly, why Braintree? Because it’s a useful mix of the urban of the new town built in the 1960s and also the patchwork of rural villages that surround it.
It’s a district of 150,000 and since that first piece of research I’ve gone back in subsequent years to map the role Facebook groups play in the district. That is apart from 2023. I think I was doing other things.
Here’s the 2025 research.
In 2025, the population of Braintree is155,000 people.
Across the district there are 569 Facebook groups across the area. Everything from sports teams, clubs, campaigns, village noticeboards and pet pages.
The overall number sometimes fluctuates. In early years, very small groups with a handful of people were unearthed by Facebook’s search engine. Search now finds the larger and more established groups.
For example, the village of Ashen with 300 residents has just one Facebook group with just over 300 members.
In larger places there are more Facebook groups. So, in Gestingthorpe where more than 400 live there are seven groups including the Gestingthorpe Village Facebook group with 600 members.
In the bright lights of Braintree itself, 48 Facebook groups can be found with almost 200,000 members combined. There are a number of groups from Braintree Hub with 30,000 members, Braintree and Surrounding (Buy and Sell) almost 8,000 with the local history group Braintree as it was with 10,000 members.
Across the whole of Braintree district there are almost 600 groups with a combined membership of more than 825,000.
If you are a nerd about this, all this means that are roughly 5.5 Facebook group memberships per head of population.
Sceptics would reasonably point out that some people who are members of groups don’t live in the area. Maybe they moved away but still want to check in on what’s going on. Maybe their parents live there.
But the figure is sizable enough to be a yardstick of how important Facebook groups are in a community.
The critical significance of Facebook groups
Newspapers and newsrooms are in established decline and they have moved away from the business model which they ran successfully for more than a century.
Advertising has moved online, Reach plc websites have moved away from covering the local area in the frantic search for clicks. Reach’s Black Country Live Facebook page near me may promise Black Country stories but delivers entertainment news and stories from across the UK almost 50 per cent of the time.
There are two main reasons why Facebook groups are significant to public sector communicators.
The first is Ofcom data that shows they are the prime route to find council news in their area.
In other words, Facebook groups are not only where people are but it’s also where people are finding out about what’s going on locally.
The figures here are for local government, but I’d argue police, NHS and fire and rescue will be close behind.
The second reason why Facebook groups are significant is because they are still taking up a big chunk of people’s Facebook timelines.
A couple of weeks ago I used this table published by Meta to show that links from Facebook pages are still not cutting through.
Just 1.3 per cent of people’s timelines are taken up with a page with a link. That’s vanishingly small.
But if you also look at the column to the left you’ll see 14.4 per cent of people’s timelines are from Facebook groups which don’t have links.
That’s a big chunk of attention.
Some Facebook groups are going to be good and some are not.
Navigating all this is why I run ESSENTIAL COMMS SKILLS BOOSTER workshops.
I deliver training to help you make sense of the changing landscape ESSENTIAL AI FOR PUBLIC SECTOR COMMS, ESSENTIAL COMMS SKILLS BOOSTER, ESSENTIAL MEDIA RELATIONS and ESSENTIAL VIDEO SKILLS REBOOTED.
Creative commons credit: Marine Parade with commercial vehicles and crowds, 1989 by Robin Webster, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons