Worldwide Social Media Benchmarks: Beauty & Drug Stores Q3 2026

What’s in this report

Beauty and drugstore social media benchmarks for Q3 2026 show retailers getting far more from Instagram than Facebook: the median beauty and drugstore retailer’s Instagram post earned 31 interactions in September, against five on Facebook. Median engagement reached up to 1.02% on Instagram and up to 0.37% on Facebook across the quarter. Reels led on Instagram, and Live Video led on Facebook.

This quarterly benchmarks report draws on Emplifi’s dataset of 1,045 Facebook pages and 641 Instagram profiles in the worldwide beauty and drug stores 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 and drugstore retail.

Organic performance: Facebook and Instagram

Interaction share by industry

Ecommerce brands collect the largest share of Facebook interactions of any category broken out in the data, and fashion leads Instagram with more than 40%, followed by beauty. Beauty and drug stores are not broken out as a separate category in this data.

Facebook interaction distribution (Q3 2026):

Instagram interaction distribution (Q3 2026):

The table shows the five categories with the largest interaction share among the region’s six highest-posting categories. Others combines every remaining category.

Platform landscape at a glance

These are busy accounts. The median retailer published 71 Instagram posts in the quarter, more than five a week, and its Instagram profile collected about nine times the interactions of its Facebook page.

Median post interactions

The median follows the middle-ranked page or profile each month, so a few viral accounts can’t pull it up.

Instagram has stayed between 26 and 32 for all 15 months and ended September at 31. Facebook held at seven until February 2026, then slipped to five or six for the rest of the period.

Relative median post interactions

Indexed to each platform’s own 15-month high, Instagram finished September at 97% of its peak and Facebook at 71%, 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.

The median Instagram post was displayed about twice as often as a Facebook post in September. Instagram impressions peaked at 12,179 in August 2025, fell to about 4,400 by May 2026 and recovered to around 6,000 in Q3. Facebook has fallen more steadily, from 6,987 in August 2025 to under 3,000 in the last two months. Median Facebook impressions for brands worldwide fell over the same period, from about 1,500 to 779, so the trend is not unique to these retailers.

Engagement rate trends

Median post engagement rates this quarter:

• Instagram: up to 1.02%
• Facebook: up to 0.37%

Instagram’s median ranged from 0.81% to 1.02% across the quarter, and Facebook’s from 0.32% to 0.37%. September was Instagram’s highest month of the 15, up from a low of 0.67% in 2025. Facebook moved in a narrow 0.26% to 0.38% band 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 a median of 28 interactions, seven times a photo, but made up only 0.2% of these retailers’ Facebook posts in September. Links came second. Reels, status updates and photos earned four or five interactions each.

Instagram: Reels led, a quarter ahead of carousels and more than twice a single image.

Full organic post type performance (Q3 2026):

Post type distribution trends:

Photos still make up 61.6% of beauty and drugstore retailers’ Facebook posts, down from 71.5% in July 2025. Reels rose from 14.9% to 33.2%, with a step from 14.6% to 26.4% between September and October 2025. On Instagram, Reels were 46.3% of posts in September 2026, carousels rose from 24.1% to 27.0%, and single images fell from 31.6% to 25.9%.

Top performing pages and profiles

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

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

Volume runs high in this category. Vietnam’s Nhà Thuốc FPT Long Châu posted 942 times on Facebook in the quarter, and Turkey’s Gratis posted 2,014 times on Instagram, more than 20 a day.

Top posts this quarter

Celebrity moments drove the top posts: LISA’s visit to a Shiseido studio made the top three on both platforms, and Sephora France’s top Reel came from Ariana Grande’s tour.

Facebook:

Instagram:

How does your brand compare?

These benchmarks describe the median beauty and drugstore retailer. 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

This quarter’s data has no beauty and drugstore-specific ad benchmark, so the paid figures below come from Emplifi’s Worldwide ad accounts benchmark, which spans ad accounts in every industry.

Where brands are spending

Facebook feed takes about a third of the average ad budget, 19.06 percentage points more than Instagram feed. Facebook Reels and Instagram Reels follow almost level, then Instagram Stories.

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, Facebook Reels and Instagram Reels

Facebook feed and Facebook Reels buy the cheapest clicks of the five. Instagram feed is the most expensive placement for reach, and Instagram Reels the most expensive for clicks.

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

Click-through rate by placement

Facebook feed’s click-through rate is more than five times Instagram Reels’, and Facebook Reels also clears 1%.

CTR by placement (Q3 2026):

Cost trends over time

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

Worldwide CPM peaked at $2.32 in November 2025, fell to $1.68 in January 2026 and rose through spring. After a July dip to $1.90, September brought its highest level since that November peak. CTR climbed from 0.95% in July 2025 to a 15-month high in September 2026, and the brands benchmark followed both trends a little lower. No monthly CPC series is available.

How to use these benchmarks

Use these medians as a reference point for beauty and drugstore retailers, 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, Reels are the strongest format and already the most-used, so the next gain is moving single-image posts to carousels. On Facebook, where most formats earn a handful of interactions, links and live sessions are the two worth testing.

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: 1,045 Facebook brand pages and 641 Instagram brand profiles in the worldwide beauty and drug stores 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.