Australia and New Zealand Social Media Benchmarks: Entertainment Q3 2026

What’s in this report

Australia and New Zealand entertainment social media benchmarks for Q3 2026 show Instagram on a strong run: the median entertainment brand’s Instagram post earned 338.5 interactions in September, after a 15-month high of 372.5 in August, while the median Facebook post earned 25. Reels led Instagram by a wide margin, and on Facebook, photos still out-earned Reels. Every one of the quarter’s six top posts was a Reel.

This quarterly benchmarks report draws on Emplifi’s dataset of 438 Facebook pages and 247 Instagram profiles of entertainment brands in Australia and New Zealand, 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 uplifts are averages from Emplifi’s Worldwide Brands UGC benchmark, measured across 68 to 83 accounts per metric. That benchmark includes brands from every category worldwide, so it is not specific to entertainment brands in Australia and New Zealand.

Organic performance: Facebook and Instagram

Platform landscape at a glance

Instagram is the bigger channel on every count except posting volume. The median entertainment profile has about 126,000 Instagram followers against about 99,000 Facebook fans, and posts 44 times a quarter against 55 on Facebook. Instagram still collects more than nine times the interactions.

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’s median post interactions climbed from a low of 201 in October 2025 to 343 in June 2026 and 372.5 in August, the high point of the 15 months, before easing to 338.5 in September. Facebook was steady, between 23 and 29.5 interactions per post for the whole period, and finished the quarter at 25.

Relative median post interactions

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

Instagram ended September 2026 at 91% of its August peak, up from 54% in October 2025. Facebook finished at 85% of its June 2026 high and never fell below 78% in the period.

Median post impressions

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

Emplifi’s dataset has too few entertainment profiles in Australia and New Zealand with impression data this quarter, so the impressions below are the Worldwide entertainment medians.

In the Worldwide entertainment series, Instagram impressions recovered from a February 2026 low of 11,338 to between 17,488 and 17,687 during Q3. Facebook impressions dropped from 6,880 in December 2025 to about 3,691 in September 2026. The fall is not specific to entertainment: median Facebook impressions for all brands worldwide declined from about 1,500 in July 2025 to 779 in September 2026.

Engagement rate trends

For the same reason, the engagement rates below are the Worldwide entertainment medians, not figures for Australia and New Zealand alone.

Median post engagement rates this quarter:

• Instagram: up to 2.24%
• Facebook: up to 0.73%

Instagram’s monthly median ranged from 2.12% to 2.24% across the quarter, and Facebook’s from 0.68% to 0.73%. Instagram reached its highest rate of the 15 months in September, up from 1.58% in September and October 2025, while Facebook held between 0.68% and 0.77% 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 drew a median of 61 interactions per post, three times the next format, but entertainment brands used it for just 0.3% of their Facebook posts in September. Photos (20) beat Reels (17), and both were well ahead of status updates and links.

Instagram: Reels earned a median of 475 interactions, nearly double the 250 for carousels and almost three times a single image.

Full organic post type performance (Q3 2026):

Post type distribution trends:

Reels overtook photos as the most-used Facebook format during 2026. Their share rose from 29.2% of posts in July 2025 to 40.0% in October 2025 and 45.4% in September 2026, while photos fell from 51.9% to 43.9% and links from 9.4% to 4.4%. On Instagram, Reels grew from 55.1% to 58.4% of posts, carousels edged up to 28.4%, and single images fell from 18.1% to 13.4%.

Top performing pages and profiles

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

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

Ozzy Man Reviews collected about twice the Facebook interactions of 7NEWS Australia from 427 posts, against nearly 10,000 for the news page. Sport and news brands take the Instagram top three, led by 7AFL.

Top posts this quarter

All six top posts were Reels, and personality-led clips dominate: two commentary Reels from Ozzy Man Reviews and a comedy clip on Facebook, and a dating show moment, a comedy creator and a film interview on Instagram. The Instagram top three finished within about 36,000 interactions of each other.

Facebook:

Instagram:

How does your brand compare?

These benchmarks describe the median entertainment brand in Australia and New Zealand. 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 placement figures below come from Emplifi’s entertainment ad accounts benchmark, which pools entertainment ad accounts across all regions, so they are not specific to Australia and New Zealand.

Where brands are spending

Facebook feed takes the largest share of the average entertainment ad budget, 24.70%, with Instagram Reels close behind at 22.45%. Instagram feed, Facebook Reels and Instagram Stories split most of the rest.

CPC and CPM by placement

The most cost-efficient placements this quarter:

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

Clicks are cheapest on Facebook feed, at $0.16, and impressions cheapest on Instagram Reels, at $2.83 per thousand. Facebook Reels is the only placement in the top three on both measures.

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

Click-through rate by placement

Both Facebook placements beat every Instagram placement on CTR by a wide margin: Facebook feed at 2.55% and Facebook Reels at 1.70%, against 0.46% to 0.52% on Instagram.

CTR by placement (Q3 2026):

Cost trends over time

There is no entertainment series in the ad trend files, so the table pairs the Australia and New Zealand overall benchmark (ad accounts in every industry in the region) with Emplifi’s all-brands benchmark, which pools brand ad accounts across all regions. Figures are for September 2026, with the quarter’s monthly range:

Advertising in Australia and New Zealand costs about twice the all-brands level per thousand impressions. The regional CPM rose from $3.20 in July 2025 to a peak of $4.57 in June 2026, then settled at $4.22 in September. Regional CTR climbed from a low of 0.87% in September 2025 to about 1.30% in December 2025 and April 2026, and slipped to 1.14% in September 2026. No monthly CPC series is available.

How to use these benchmarks

Treat these medians as a calibration point for entertainment brands in Australia and New Zealand, 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

Make Reels the default on Instagram, where they out-earn carousels by almost two to one. On Facebook, keep photos in the mix alongside Reels, and test Live Video, which few brands use.

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: 438 Facebook brand pages and 247 Instagram brand profiles in the entertainment category in Australia and New Zealand, 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.