Media
Power List
2025

Local media (town newspapers and regional online titles) carries nearly three-quarters of all stories. These are individual-home stories that build community trust where families actually look.

Trade titles carry group-level updates and sector news (20%). National coverage, though rarest at 7 per cent, shapes the broadest public understanding of care. 16 groups secured trade mentions; 13 featured in the national press.

Carebase tops the media ranking with 192 articles, well clear of Care South (143) and Berkley Care Group (125). A notable exception to the local-dominance trend is Signature Senior Lifestyle: over half its 67 articles appeared in trade publications.

Oakland Care and Richmond Villages shared fifth place on 57 articles each. Coverage is overwhelmingly local: individual home stories are the backbone of care sector PR.

Dividing total articles by number of homes reveals a different picture. Berkley Care Group leapfrogs Care South into second place, with 11 articles per home versus Care South's eight.

Signature Senior Lifestyle drops to sixth on this measure despite ranking fourth overall, its trade-focused coverage is concentrated at group level, not per home. DMP Healthcare sits at the bottom at 0.22, with just two articles across nine homes.

Strip out individual-home stories and a different picture emerges. Signature Senior Lifestyle leads on group-level coverage with 29 articles; corporate coverage comprised 43 per cent of its total, the highest share of any group.

Notably, Carebase, the overall leader, generates almost no corporate coverage: its 192 articles are built almost entirely on individual-home stories. Corporate makes up only 0.5 per cent of its total.

The Spinney Care Home (Carebase) stands far above every other home, driven by extensive coverage of a single event: in April 2025 it hosted a wedding so a resident could walk her daughter “down the aisle”. The story ran across national and regional publications.

After The Spinney came a cluster: Marjorie House (Carebase, 21), then Blenheim House (Berkley Care Group) and Bridge House (Carebase) tied on 17, and Jubilee House (Berkley Care Group) on 16.

The backdrop to providers' channel choices is the whole UK user base. Facebook leads with 58.3m users in 2025, 31 per cent of all users across the five platforms. LinkedIn is the fastest-growing platform between 2023 and 2025, reaching 47.5m.

TikTok has grown more than 500 per cent since 2019, though its growth has slowed since 2023. X/Twitter has stayed broadly flat, rising just four million over the period.

Facebook accounts for nearly two-thirds of the sector's combined social following, 62 per cent. Despite years of TikTok hype, care providers' audiences remain firmly on Facebook.

LinkedIn at 19 per cent is the second-largest platform, though this marks a decline from 21 per cent in 2024, bucking the expected trend of LinkedIn's growing prominence. X/Twitter (12%), Instagram (5%) and TikTok (1%) make up the remainder.

Comparing across the 2023, 2024 and 2025 Power Lists, Facebook's dominance dipped in 2024 as LinkedIn grew from 12% to 21%, then rebounded in 2025 as LinkedIn investment levelled off to 19%.

Instagram suffered a notable decline between 2024 and 2025, dropping from 11% to 5% of the sector's combined following. TikTok has grown from near-zero to just over 1%. X/Twitter remained virtually unchanged across all three years.

Carebase tops the social rankings with 43,800 followers, with a notably large share on X/Twitter: its following makes up 50 per cent of the total X followers across all care groups. Berkley Care Group follows closely on 41,200, 34,000 of it on Facebook.

Oakland Care shows the most diverse mix and leads on LinkedIn (11,800 followers). Signature Senior Lifestyle and Wellburn Care Homes complete the top five. The combined following across all groups is 293,920.

Oakland Care leads with 18,387 corporate followers, mostly on account of its dominant LinkedIn presence which makes up 64 per cent of its total corporate social media following. Carebase follows, bolstered by a significant X/Twitter following larger than all other groups combined.

For almost all groups, LinkedIn proves much more prominent at the corporate level, with Facebook more widely used by individual homes. Only Richmond Villages and Wellburn Care Homes operate a corporate TikTok account. Carewise Homes ranks last with just 26 LinkedIn followers and no other corporate accounts.

Fernhill House (Berkley Care Group) topped the individual home rankings with 9,500 followers, all on Facebook. It knocked Cumnor Hill House (7,200, also Berkley Care Group) off the top spot it held in both 2023 and 2024.

Bridge House Care Home (Carebase) ranked fifth with 3,560 followers and the most diverse platform mix of the top 10: Facebook (2,000), X (1,400) and Instagram (160). The Orchards Residential Home (Buckland Care, 5,100) ranked third, followed by Dryclough Manor (Carewise Homes, 4,600).