Social media spend: FOI release

Information requested

With regards to a) The Scottish Government as a whole and b) Individual Ministers, for the financial year 2025-26:

1) The total amount spent by a) and b) on paid subscriptions to social media platforms including but not limited to X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, YouTube etc.

2) The total amount spent by a) and b) on paid advertising or post promotion on those platforms.

With both totals broken down by spending per platform by group a) and by b).

Response

1. The table below shows total Scottish Government spend on paid subscriptions across social media platforms in the financial year 2025-26.

Channel	2025-26
Meta (Facebook/Instagram)	£0
X (formerly Twitter)	£0
TikTok	£0
LinkedIn	£97,775
Total	£97,775

Scottish Government is not responsible for individual Ministers’ personal social media accounts and therefore holds no information on any expenditure linked to those accounts.

2. While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance the Scottish Government does not hold the information you have asked for. The reason we cannot provide this information is because the breakdown you requested is held by our media agencies and not within Scottish Government.

This is a formal notice under section 17(1) of FOISA that the Scottish Government does not have the information you have requested. In regards to 2025-26 paid marketing spend, your request is exempt under section 27(1) of FOISA, which allows public authorities not to disclose information if they already plan to publish it within the next 12 weeks.

Scottish Government marketing and advertising spend is published each year and can be found at https://www.gov.scot/collections/marketing-spend/ including a breakdown by media type. The information for 2025-26 will be published within 12 weeks of the date of your request and we consider that it is reasonable to withhold the information until then, rather than release this information before the planned publication.

The Scottish Government can also commission additional targeted advertising on an ad-hoc basis for vacancies which are required to attract a significant volume of applications (including cases where there are large numbers of positions to fill or which include hard to fill roles).

This type of advertising is commissioned via a procurement framework with a media buyer, which is also used for the issuing of public information notices, such as road closures. You can view details of the framework on Gov.scot at: Procurement - recruitment advertising and public notices framework 2024 - gov.scot. Spending via this framework is recorded through finance systems, these purchase records do not capture advertising platform data as standard, therefore it is not possible to identify the total costs related to spend on social media platforms via this route.

As above, Scottish Government is not responsible for individual Ministers’ personal social media accounts and therefore holds no information on any expenditure linked to those accounts.

About FOI

The Scottish Government is committed to publishing all information released in response to Freedom of Information requests. View all FOI responses at https://www.gov.scot/foi-responses.