Latin America Social Media Benchmarks: Beauty Q3 2026

What’s in this report

Latin America beauty social media benchmarks for Q3 2026 show Instagram at its strongest point of the year: the median beauty brand’s Instagram post earned 50 interactions in September, against four on Facebook. Median engagement reached up to 1.86% on Instagram and up to 0.69% on Facebook across the quarter. Reels led on Instagram, and Live Video, though rarely used, drew by far the most interactions on Facebook.

This quarterly benchmarks report draws on Emplifi’s dataset of 1,005 Facebook pages and 764 Instagram profiles in the beauty category in Latin America, 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

These are averages from Emplifi’s Worldwide Brands UGC benchmark, across 68 to 83 accounts per metric. The benchmark pools brands from every category and region, so the uplifts are not specific to beauty brands in Latin America.

Organic performance: Facebook and Instagram

Interaction share by industry

Services brands collect almost a quarter of all brand interactions on Facebook in Latin America, followed by gambling and ecommerce. On Instagram, ecommerce leads with 29.7%, and alcohol punches well above its weight: 7.4% of brand posts bring in 20.2% of interactions. Beauty is the third-busiest poster on Instagram, with 9.1% of brand posts, but draws 4.4% of interactions.

Facebook interaction distribution (Q3 2026):

Instagram interaction distribution (Q3 2026):

The categories listed are those with the most brand posts in Latin America. Others combines every remaining category, including beauty on Facebook, where it accounts for under 1% of brand posts.

Platform landscape at a glance

Instagram audiences are about twice the size of Facebook ones for beauty brands in Latin America, and the median profile posts 40 times a quarter against 27 on Facebook. Over the quarter, that profile collected nearly 20 times the interactions of the median Facebook page.

Median post interactions

The median follows the typical brand each month, so a handful of viral accounts can’t distort it.

Instagram dipped to 42 in December 2025, then climbed back month by month to 50 in September 2026, close to its August 2025 high of 52.5. Facebook has hovered around five for most of the period, starting at 5.5 in July 2025 and ending the quarter at four.

Relative median post interactions

Set against its own 15-month peak, Instagram ended September 2026 at 95%, up from 80% in December 2025. Facebook finished at 73% of its July 2025 high.

Median post impressions

Impressions measure how often posts were displayed, regardless of whether anyone interacted, so they track visibility rather than engagement.

Facebook impressions fell sharply late in the quarter, from 2,399 in July 2026 to 1,273 in September, the lowest month of the period and less than a third of the September 2025 peak of 4,155. Instagram impressions bottomed out at 2,293 in March 2026 and recovered to a range of about 2,700 to 3,400 in Q3, still below the 5,058 recorded in August 2025. Lower Facebook reach is a regional pattern: median Facebook impressions for all brands in Latin America fell from 2,529 in July 2025 to 1,027 in September 2026.

Engagement rate trends

Median post engagement rates this quarter:

• Instagram: up to 1.86%
• Facebook: up to 0.69%

Instagram’s monthly median ranged from 1.64% to 1.86% in Q3 and Facebook’s from 0.55% to 0.69%. Instagram’s rate has more than doubled since its September 2025 low of 0.87%, with September 2026 the best month of the period. Facebook moved the other way, from a high of 0.78% in September 2025 to the period’s low in July 2026.

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 posts drew a median of 212.5 interactions, more than 20 times the next format, yet they made up only 0.14% of beauty brands’ Facebook posts in September. Links came second, ahead of photos, Reels and status updates, which tied.

Instagram: Reels led, carousels followed and single images trailed only a little, so the gap between formats is narrower than on Facebook.

Full organic post type performance (Q3 2026):

Post type distribution trends:

Reels nearly doubled their share of beauty brands’ Facebook posts, from 24.0% in July 2025 to 44.8% in September 2026, with the steepest step between September and October 2025. Photos dropped from 63.3% to 51.3% and status updates from 11.4% to 3.0%. On Instagram, Reels slipped from 50.5% to 46.1% of posts as carousels grew from 24.4% to 31.0%; single images held between 22% and 26%.

Top performing pages and profiles

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

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

Pink Up Cosmetics, a Mexican makeup brand, topped Facebook, and its two makeup tutorials below account for almost half of its quarter’s interactions.

Top posts this quarter

Tutorials and product launches led the quarter. Five of the six top posts were Reels or carousels.

Facebook:

Instagram:

How does your brand compare?

These benchmarks describe the median beauty brand in Latin America. A free social media assessment shows how your own profiles measure up on each platform.

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Paid performance: Facebook and Instagram ads

The placement figures below come from Emplifi’s beauty ad accounts benchmark, which pools beauty ad accounts across all regions, so they are not specific to Latin America. The cost trends compare that benchmark with Latin America overall.

Where brands are spending

Facebook feed leads beauty ad budgets with 31.6% of spend, and Instagram feed is second at 18.4%. Instagram Reels and Facebook Reels take about 12% each, with Instagram Stories just behind.

CPC and CPM by placement

The most cost-efficient placements this quarter:

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

Facebook placements give the cheapest clicks: Facebook feed at $0.22 and Facebook Reels at $0.32, against $0.71 to $0.94 on the three Instagram placements.

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

Click-through rate by placement

Facebook feed leads at 1.40%, and Facebook Reels is next at 0.83%. Among Instagram placements, Stories gets the most clicks per view and Reels the fewest.

CTR by placement (Q3 2026):

Cost trends over time

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

Ad costs in Latin America run far below the beauty benchmark: September CPM was $0.80 for the region against $1.80 for beauty. Latin America’s CPM has crept up from $0.60 in July 2025 to its highest level of the period in September 2026, and its CTR rose from 0.74% to 1.09% over the same 15 months, also a period high. The beauty benchmark’s CTR eased from 0.98% in July to 0.81% in September. No monthly CPC series is available.

How to use these benchmarks

Treat these medians as a reference point for beauty brands in Latin America. Compare your own September 2026 figures with them:

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

On Instagram, Reels are the format to beat, but carousels and single images are close enough to keep in the mix. On Facebook, Live Video and links have outperformed the photos that still make up half of beauty brands’ posts.

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: 1,005 Facebook brand pages and 764 Instagram brand profiles in the beauty category in Latin America, 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.