Worldwide Social Media Benchmarks: Confectionery Q3 2026

What’s in this report

Confectionery social media benchmarks for Q3 2026 put Instagram far ahead of Facebook on interactions: the median confectionery brand’s Instagram post earned 49 interactions in September, against nine on Facebook. Median engagement reached up to 2.18% on Instagram and up to 0.45% on Facebook across the quarter. Carousels were the strongest organic format on Instagram, and confectionery advertisers paid a September CPM of $1.12, about half the Worldwide figure.

This quarterly benchmarks report draws on Emplifi’s dataset of 2,691 Facebook pages and 1,505 Instagram profiles in the worldwide confectionery 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 confectionery.

Organic performance: Facebook and Instagram

Interaction share by industry

Ecommerce brands take the largest share of Facebook interactions of any category broken out in the data, and fashion leads Instagram by a wide margin. Confectionery is counted inside the FMCG food category in this breakdown. On Facebook, FMCG food earns more than its posting weight: 3.0% of brand posts and 4.2% of interactions, enough to place it fourth among the categories shown. On Instagram it publishes 1.1% of brand posts and collects 0.9% of interactions.

Facebook interaction distribution (Q3 2026):

Instagram interaction distribution (Q3 2026):

The table ranks the region’s six highest-posting categories, plus FMCG food as confectionery’s own category, by share of interactions. Others combines every remaining category.

Platform landscape at a glance

Facebook is the bigger audience for confectionery brands, but Instagram is where people respond. The median page has about twice the fans of the median Instagram profile, yet Instagram collects almost five times the interactions over the quarter, while posting somewhat more often.

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 held between 47 and 55 interactions per post for the full 15 months, peaking in April 2026 and ending September at 49. Facebook tells a different story. It sat at 16 for most of 2025, then eased through 2026 and fell to nine in September, the lowest point of the period.

Relative median post interactions

Indexed to each platform’s own 15-month high, Instagram finished September 2026 at 89% of its April 2026 peak. Facebook ended at 56% of its 16-interaction peak, the steeper fall of the two and 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.

Facebook posts were seen slightly more often than Instagram posts in September, even though they drew a fraction of the interactions. Both series have come down from their highs. Instagram impressions dropped from about 4,800 in late 2025 to about 2,200 by February 2026, and have moved between roughly 1,900 and 2,600 since.

Facebook peaked at 6,221 in January 2026 and has fallen every month since June. The decline is not specific to confectionery: 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 2.18%
• Facebook: up to 0.45%

Instagram’s median ranged from 2.05% to 2.18% across the quarter, and Facebook’s from 0.44% to 0.45%. Instagram’s rate nearly doubled over the 15 months, from a low of 1.15% in September 2025 to a high of 2.35% in April 2026, with the sharpest rise between November 2025 and February 2026. Facebook stayed in a narrow 0.43% to 0.55% 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 led with a median of 22.5 interactions, but it accounted for only 0.1% of confectionery brands’ Facebook posts in September. Link posts came second at 12.5, ahead of photos at nine. Reels, now the second most-used format, earned seven.

Instagram: Carousels were the clear winner at a median of 70 interactions, two thirds more than single images (42) and about 80% more than Reels (39). They are also the least-used of the three formats.

Full organic post type performance (Q3 2026):

Post type distribution trends:

Photos remain the main Facebook format for confectionery brands, but their share fell from 66.1% of posts in July 2025 to 55.7% in September 2026. Reels took most of that ground, rising from 23.6% to 40.7%, with a step up from 23.2% to 35.3% between September and October 2025. On Instagram, Reels make up almost half of all posts (48.6% in September 2026), single images slipped from 38.3% to 32.4%, and carousels edged up from 14.7% to 17.6%.

Top performing pages and profiles

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

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

Baked by Melissa’s top Instagram profile ranking owes 46% of its quarter’s interactions to a single recipe Reel, the top post below.

Top posts this quarter

Recipes did well on both platforms: the top post on each was a step-by-step recipe Reel. Five of the six top posts were Reels.

Facebook:

Instagram:

How does your brand compare?

These benchmarks describe the median confectionery brand. A free social media assessment shows where your own Facebook pages and Instagram profiles sit against them.

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Paid performance: Facebook and Instagram ads

The placement figures below come from Emplifi’s confectionery ad accounts benchmark, which pools confectionery ad accounts across all regions. The cost trends table sets the confectionery benchmark beside the Worldwide overall figure for context.

Where brands are spending

Facebook feed dominates confectionery ad budgets at 44.93% of spend, 27.46 percentage points more than Instagram feed in second place. Instagram Reels take a bigger share than Facebook Reels, and Instagram Stories round out the top five.

CPC and CPM by placement

The most cost-efficient placements this quarter:

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

Confectionery placements are cheap to reach people with: every placement in the top five has a CPM below $2. Clicks are another matter. Instagram Reels costs $2.48 per click, almost seven times Facebook feed.

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

Click-through rate by placement

Click-through rates for confectionery ads are low across the board. Facebook feed leads at 0.29%, and no Instagram placement reaches 0.1%, which suggests these campaigns are built for awareness rather than 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:

Confectionery CPM has stayed close to $1 for the whole period, from $0.96 in July 2025 to a high of $1.27 in November 2025, and ended September 2026 at $1.12. That is about half the Worldwide overall CPM, which reached its highest level since November 2025 in September. Confectionery CTR rose from 0.18% in July 2025 to a peak of 0.25% in April 2026 and finished at 0.23%, far below the Worldwide overall rate of 1.28%. No monthly CPC series is available.

How to use these benchmarks

Use these medians as a reference point for confectionery brands, not a target to stop at. 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, the data points to carousels: they are the least-used format and the best performer. On Facebook, where interactions have slipped, test link posts and occasional Live Video alongside Reels rather than adding more photos. For paid, judge confectionery campaigns on reach and CPM before CTR, since the category’s click-through rates sit well below the Worldwide average.

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: 2,691 Facebook brand pages and 1,505 Instagram brand profiles in the worldwide confectionery 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.