Asia Pacific Social Media Benchmarks: Finance Q3 2026

What’s in this report

Asia Pacific finance social media benchmarks for Q3 2026 show Instagram ahead of Facebook per post, with Facebook pages carrying the bigger audiences: the median finance brand in Asia Pacific earned 28 interactions per Instagram post in September and 16 per Facebook post. Median engagement reached up to 1.42% on Instagram and up to 0.84% on Facebook across the quarter. Reels led on Instagram, while Facebook’s median post interactions slid to their lowest point in 15 months.

This quarterly benchmarks report draws on Emplifi’s dataset of 1,518 Facebook pages and 510 Instagram profiles of finance brands in Asia Pacific, covering July 1, 2026, through Sept. 30, 2026.

User-generated content: what’s achievable

Brands using Emplifi’s UGC solution saw these average uplifts in Q3 2026:

• 11.49x conversion rate
• 4.84x repeat website visits
• 1.03x average order value

The figures come from Emplifi’s Worldwide Brands UGC benchmark, averaged across 68 to 83 accounts per metric. That benchmark covers brands in every category and region, so it is not specific to finance or to Asia Pacific.

Organic performance: Facebook and Instagram

Interaction share by industry

Ecommerce dominates brand interactions in Asia Pacific, with 59.0% of all Facebook interactions and 38.7% on Instagram. Finance is the region’s busiest Facebook publisher, with 12.4% of all brand posts, the largest share of any category broken out in the data, yet it draws only 2.9% of interactions. On Instagram, finance accounts for 5.4% of posts and 2.9% of interactions.

Facebook interaction distribution (Q3 2026):

Instagram interaction distribution (Q3 2026):

The tables list the five categories with the most interactions among those the data breaks out for the region, which are the region’s most active publishers plus finance. Others combines every remaining category, including finance on Instagram.

Platform landscape at a glance

Facebook is the larger audience for finance brands in Asia Pacific: the median page has about three times the followers of the median Instagram profile. Instagram still edges ahead on total interactions over the quarter, about 36% more, on a similar posting rhythm of roughly five posts a week.

Median post interactions

This metric follows the middle-ranked page or profile each month, so a handful of viral accounts can’t inflate it.

Instagram has held steady: after 32.5 in July 2025 and a high of 33 in August 2025, it has stayed between 27 and 30 every month since. Facebook tells a different story. It slipped almost month by month from 25 in August 2025 to 16 in September 2026, its lowest point in the period.

Relative median post interactions

Indexing each platform to its own 15-month peak makes the two easier to compare despite their different scales.

Instagram finished September 2026 at 85% of its August 2025 high. Facebook ended at 64% of its peak, the lowest reading for either platform in the period.

Median post impressions

Impressions count how often posts were displayed, whether or not anyone interacted. They measure visibility, not engagement.

Instagram impressions are below 40% of their September 2025 peak of 7,192. Most of the fall came between October 2025 and February 2026, and the median has held between about 2,600 and 2,900 since April. Facebook impressions eased from 3,179 in July 2025 to 2,400 in July 2026, then fell to 1,335 in September. The decline is not specific to finance: median Facebook impressions for all brands in Asia Pacific fell from 3,431 in July 2025 to 1,669 in September 2026.

Engagement rate trends

Median post engagement rates this quarter:

• Instagram: up to 1.42%
• Facebook: up to 0.84%

Across the quarter’s three months, Instagram’s median ranged from 1.24% to 1.42% and Facebook’s from 0.74% to 0.84%. Instagram’s rate climbed from a low of 0.87% in October 2025 to a high of 1.68% in June 2026 before easing. Facebook stayed in a narrow 0.71% to 0.85% band for the whole 15 months.

From this quarter, Emplifi calculates engagement rate from impressions instead of reach, because Facebook no longer provides reach data. These rates are therefore not comparable with the engagement rates in earlier quarterly reports.

Best-performing post types

Facebook: Live Video led with a median of 23 interactions per post, but it made up just 0.65% of finance brands’ Facebook posts in September. Status updates, links and Reels followed at 14 to 15. Photos, the format behind seven in 10 posts, earned the lowest median.

Instagram: Reels led, ahead of carousels, with single images third.

Full organic post type performance (Q3 2026):

Post type distribution trends:

Photos made up 69.9% of finance brands’ Facebook posts in September 2026, down from 73.1% in July 2025. Reels rose from 15.4% to 23.1% over the same period, with most of the step coming in October 2025. On Instagram, the mix is close to an even three-way split: carousels reached 32.1% in September 2026, their highest share in the period, while single images slipped from 36.4% to 33.0% and Reels held at about 35%.

Top performing pages and profiles

Facebook: top pages by total interactions (Q3 2026):

Instagram: top profiles by total interactions (Q3 2026):

State Bank of India collected almost six times the Facebook interactions of the next page, GCash.

Top posts this quarter

Indian brands took all three top Facebook spots with Reels: an Independence Day post and two Ganesh Chaturthi greetings.

Facebook:

Instagram:

How does your brand compare?

These benchmarks describe the median finance brand in Asia Pacific. A free social media assessment shows where your own profiles sit against them, platform by platform.

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Paid performance: Facebook and Instagram ads

The paid figures below come from Emplifi’s finance ad accounts benchmark, which pools finance ad accounts across all regions, so they are not specific to brands in Asia Pacific. The cost trends at the end of this section add the Asia Pacific overall benchmark for regional context.

Where brands are spending

Facebook feed takes the biggest share of the average finance ad budget, 15.5 percentage points more than Facebook Reels in second place. Instagram feed and Instagram Reels follow almost level with each other.

CPC and CPM by placement

The most cost-efficient placements this quarter:

• Lowest CPC: Facebook feed, Facebook Reels and Instagram Reels
• Lowest CPM: Facebook Reels, Facebook feed and Instagram Reels

Instagram feed is the most expensive of the five placements on both measures.

Spend, CPC and CPM by placement (Q3 2026):

Click-through rate by placement

The two Facebook placements are the only ones above 1%. All three Instagram placements stay below 0.4%.

CTR by placement (Q3 2026):

Cost trends over time

Q3 2026 ad cost benchmarks, shown for September 2026 with the quarter’s monthly range:

Finance CPM rose from $1.13 in July 2025 to $1.49 in September 2026, its highest level in the 15 months. Asia Pacific CPM is far lower: it bottomed at $0.51 in October 2025 and again in January 2026, then climbed to $0.83 in September, also a period high. CTR improved on both series, from 0.84% to 1.36% for finance and from 0.95% to 1.22% for Asia Pacific overall. No monthly CPC series is available.

How to use these benchmarks

Treat these medians as a calibration point for finance brands in Asia Pacific, not a ceiling. Pull the same measures for your own Facebook and Instagram profiles and set them against the September 2026 figures above:

• Median post interactions
• Median post impressions
• Median engagement rate
• Post type mix

If your Facebook page relies mostly on photos, test Reels, links and status updates, which all out-earned photos this quarter. On Instagram, keep Reels at the core and use carousels for explainers.

Methodology

This report is produced quarterly from Emplifi’s proprietary social media dataset, drawn from the platform used by more than 22,000 brands worldwide.

Data collection: Data is pulled once per quarter and reflects the state of Emplifi’s database at the start of the quarter following the period analyzed. It is not updated between releases.

Sample: 1,518 Facebook brand pages and 510 Instagram brand profiles of finance brands in Asia Pacific, July 1, 2026, through Sept. 30, 2026.

Reporting period: Monthly metrics are reported for September 2026, the final month of the quarter, and trend commentary covers July 2025 through September 2026. The ads trend series also covers July 2025 through September 2026.

Minimum thresholds: Reports require a minimum of 50 Instagram profiles and 50 Facebook pages for a given region and industry combination. Interaction distribution data requires a minimum of 300 profiles. Ad benchmarks require a minimum of 200 active ad accounts from the region or industry.

Key definitions

• Interactions (Facebook): Sum of all reactions (Like, Love, Haha, Wow, Sorry, Anger), comments and shares on brand-published posts. Care reactions are counted under Likes.
• Interactions (Instagram): Sum of likes, comments, saves, shares and reposts on brand-published posts. Saves, shares and reposts are counted from Q3 2026.
• Median post interactions: The middle-ranked page or profile when sorted by monthly post interactions. It represents typical performance rather than an average, so outliers don’t skew the figure.
• Relative median interactions: Median interactions indexed to the maximum value in the reporting period for each platform, expressed as a percentage. Useful for comparing direction across platforms at different absolute scales.
• Impressions: The number of times a post was displayed, whether or not anyone interacted with it. Reflects visibility rather than engagement.
• Engagement rate: Interactions divided by impressions, expressed as a percentage. From Q3 2026 the rate is based on impressions instead of reach, because Facebook no longer provides reach data, so it is not comparable with earlier quarters.
• Organic: Posts not paid to be promoted, detected using Emplifi’s internal algorithm with near-100% accuracy.
• CPC / CPM: Median cost per click and cost per thousand impressions across all available ad accounts, shown for the top five placements by relative spend.
• Relative spend: Normalized distribution (%) showing the average share of an account’s budget allocated to each placement.
• CTR: Median click-through rate for the top five placements by relative spend.

All costs are in USD. All figures are medians unless otherwise noted; UGC uplifts are averages. Data is first normalized at the profile or page level before aggregation.