Worldwide Social Media Benchmarks: Beauty Q3 2026

What’s in this report

Beauty social media benchmarks for Q3 2026 show Instagram doing almost all the work: the median beauty brand’s Instagram post earned 41 interactions in September, against five on Facebook. Median engagement reached up to 1.85% on Instagram, a 15-month high, and up to 0.83% on Facebook across the quarter. Carousels and Reels finished almost level on Instagram, while Live Video led on Facebook.

This quarterly benchmarks report draws on Emplifi’s dataset of 7,061 Facebook pages and 5,267 Instagram profiles in the worldwide beauty category, 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, so it is not specific to beauty.

Organic performance: Facebook and Instagram

Interaction share by industry

On Instagram, beauty is the second-largest category by interactions after fashion, but it posts more than it earns: 21.7% of brand posts for 13.5% of interactions. On Facebook it is a minor category, with 2.0% of posts and 2.1% of interactions. Ecommerce collects the largest Facebook share of any category broken out in the data.

Facebook interaction distribution (Q3 2026):

Instagram interaction distribution (Q3 2026):

The table ranks the region’s six highest-posting categories by share of interactions and shows the top five. Others combines every remaining category, Facebook beauty included.

Platform landscape at a glance

Beauty brands have the bigger audience on Instagram, post there more often and collect about 13 times the interactions over the quarter. For the median brand, Facebook is a much smaller channel.

Median post interactions

Because the median follows the middle-ranked page or profile, a few viral launches can’t skew it.

Instagram has barely moved, between 39 and 43 for all 15 months. Facebook has edged down from seven, where it sat through January 2026, to five since June.

Relative median post interactions

Against its own 15-month high, Instagram finished September at 95% of its mid-2025 peak. Facebook ended at 71% of its peak, its lowest reading of the period.

Median post impressions

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

Instagram posts were displayed more than twice as often as Facebook posts in September. Instagram impressions dropped from about 5,400 in August 2025 to under 2,800 by March 2026 and have recovered slightly since. Facebook held between about 2,550 and 2,900 until January 2026, then declined, falling fastest in Q3. The decline is not specific to beauty: median impressions for brands worldwide fell from about 1,500 to 779 on Facebook and from about 3,900 to about 2,050 on Instagram between July 2025 and September 2026.

Engagement rate trends

Median post engagement rates this quarter:

• Instagram: up to 1.85%
• Facebook: up to 0.83%

Instagram’s median ranged from 1.63% to 1.85% across the quarter, and Facebook’s from 0.71% to 0.83%. Instagram’s rate has climbed in most months since a low of 1.05% in September 2025, with September 2026 the highest month of the period. Facebook stayed within 0.67% to 0.84% throughout.

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 earned more than twice the median interactions of links, the next-best format, and four times photos, Reels and status updates. It made up 0.5% of beauty brands’ Facebook posts in September.

Instagram: Carousels and Reels finished one interaction apart, and both earned about 55% more than a single image.

Full organic post type performance (Q3 2026):

Post type distribution trends:

Reels have doubled their share of beauty brands’ Facebook posts, from 21.7% in July 2025 to 43.4% in September 2026, with the biggest step between September and October 2025. Photos fell from 63.4% to 51.7%. On Instagram, Reels hold steady at about 47% of posts, carousels grew from 21.6% to 27.6% and single images fell from 28.2% to 23.7%.

Top performing pages and profiles

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

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

rhode skin topped Instagram with about 10.2 million interactions on 98 posts, ahead of brands with much larger followings. Jula’s Herb Thailand led Facebook by posting 421 times in the quarter.

Top posts this quarter

Celebrity faces drove the biggest Instagram numbers: two of the three top posts were Herbalife’s #FuelLikeRonaldo series, and the third was Selena Gomez’s Rare Beauty. Facebook’s top three were a wellness product, a World Cup poll and a makeup look.

Facebook:

Instagram:

How does your brand compare?

These benchmarks describe the median beauty brand. A free social media assessment shows where your own pages and profiles sit against them, platform by platform.

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Paid performance: Facebook and Instagram ads

Beauty has its own ad benchmark this quarter, so the figures below come from beauty ad accounts only. The cost trends table sets them beside the brands benchmark and the Worldwide overall figure.

Where brands are spending

Facebook feed takes almost a third of beauty ad budgets, 13.27 percentage points ahead of Instagram feed. Instagram Reels, Facebook Reels and Instagram Stories follow within about two points of each other.

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 buy the cheapest clicks: Facebook feed’s CPC is less than a third of any Instagram placement’s. Instagram Reels is the cheap way to buy reach, with a CPM almost level with Facebook feed’s.

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

Click-through rate by placement

Facebook feed’s click-through rate is about six times Instagram Reels’, the lowest of the five. Instagram Stories outperforms Instagram feed on clicks.

CTR by placement (Q3 2026):

Cost trends over time

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

Beauty CPM has been volatile. It rose from $1.47 in July 2025 to a peak of $2.47 in December, fell to $1.21 by March 2026 and ended September below both the brands benchmark and the Worldwide overall figure. Beauty CTR peaked at 1.11% in December 2025 and slipped in Q3 while the Worldwide rate rose. No monthly CPC series is available.

How to use these benchmarks

Use these medians as a reference point for beauty brands, not a ceiling. Pull the same measures for your own profiles and compare them with the September 2026 figures above:

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

On Instagram, carousels match Reels on interactions and are still the least-used of the two, so they are worth more of the mix. On Facebook, where everyday formats earn a handful of interactions, Live Video is the format that stands apart.

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: 7,061 Facebook brand pages and 5,267 Instagram brand profiles in the worldwide beauty category, 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.