North America Social Media Benchmarks: Fashion Q3 2026

What’s in this report

North America fashion social media benchmarks for Q3 2026 show Instagram near its best and Facebook at its weakest: the median fashion brand’s Instagram post earned 34.5 interactions in September, against five on Facebook. Median engagement reached up to 1.73% on Instagram, a 15-month high, and up to 0.60% on Facebook. Carousels led Instagram, Live Video led Facebook, and Champion took three of the six top posts.

This quarterly benchmarks report draws on Emplifi’s dataset of 1,176 Facebook pages and 1,169 Instagram profiles of fashion brands in North 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, measured across 68 to 83 accounts per metric. The benchmark includes brands in every category worldwide, so it is not specific to fashion or to North America.

Organic performance: Facebook and Instagram

Interaction share by industry

Ecommerce takes 44.1% of Facebook brand interactions in North America among the categories broken out, far ahead of finance. On Instagram, alcohol leads with 23.8%, followed by beauty and retail. Fashion earns more than its share of posts on Facebook, 4.4% of interactions from 3.4% of posts, and holds steady on Instagram, where it ranks fourth with 9.5% of interactions from 9.6% of posts.

Facebook interaction distribution (Q3 2026):

Instagram interaction distribution (Q3 2026):

The categories listed are those with the most brand posts in North America, plus fashion. Others combines every remaining category, including fashion on Facebook.

Platform landscape at a glance

The median fashion brand in North America has about 151,000 Instagram followers and about 82,000 Facebook fans. It posts more on Instagram, 46 times in the quarter against 36, and collects about 12 times the interactions there.

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 stayed between 28 and 35 interactions per post over the 15 months. It rose from 30 in July to 35 in August, the high point of the period, and held at 34.5 in September. Facebook slipped from eight in mid-2025 to six or seven for most of 2026 and five in September, its lowest month.

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 99% of its August high and never dropped below 80%. Facebook closed at 63% of its peak of eight, the lowest point of the period for either platform.

Median post impressions

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

Instagram impressions fell from a peak of 28,249 in August 2025 to 6,988 in January 2026, rebounded to 14,418 in July 2026 and eased to 10,022 by September. Facebook impressions dropped from 7,271 in July 2025 to 1,936 in September 2026, the lowest point of the period, including a sharp fall during Q3 from 4,176 in July. The decline is not specific to fashion: median Facebook impressions for all brands in North America fell from 249 in July 2025 to 133 in September 2026.

Engagement rate trends

Median post engagement rates this quarter:

• Instagram: up to 1.73%
• Facebook: up to 0.60%

Across the quarter’s three months, Instagram’s median ranged from 1.37% to 1.73% and Facebook’s from 0.47% to 0.60%. Instagram’s September rate is the highest of the 15 months and more than double its September 2025 low of 0.65%. Facebook moved between 0.42% and 0.61% over the period.

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 11.5 interactions per post, about twice a Reel at six, and made up 0.2% of fashion brands’ Facebook posts in September. Links and photos were close behind Reels at 5.5 and five, and status updates earned two.

Instagram: Carousels led with a median of 45 interactions, about a third more than Reels at 34 and two and a half times a single image.

Full organic post type performance (Q3 2026):

Post type distribution trends:

Photos fell from 76.5% of fashion brands’ Facebook posts in July 2025 to 59.8% in September 2026. Reels rose from 11.1% to 26.8% in October 2025 and 35.4% in September 2026, and status updates fell from 10.0% to 2.8%. On Instagram, carousels are the most-used format and still growing, from 35.9% to 39.7% of posts, while single images fell from 29.6% to 23.7% and Reels held at about 36%.

Top performing pages and profiles

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

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

Luckless Outfitters led Facebook with more than 1 million interactions, about 1.7 times Champion in second place, while DGK reached third from just 25 posts. Champion topped Instagram with 3.9 million interactions from 96 posts, ahead of Supreme, which has almost three times as many followers.

Top posts this quarter

Champion had the strongest quarter for single posts: its “Spoken like a true Champion” Reel ranked first on Facebook and second on Instagram, and its carousel introducing “V for Champion” led Instagram with about 906,000 interactions.

Facebook:

Instagram:

How does your brand compare?

These benchmarks describe the median fashion brand in North America. A free social media assessment shows where your own profiles sit against them, platform by platform.

Get your free social media assessment

Paid performance: Facebook and Instagram ads

The placement figures below come from Emplifi’s fashion ad accounts benchmark, which pools fashion ad accounts across all regions, so they are not specific to North America. The cost trends table adds the North America overall benchmark, which covers ad accounts in every industry in the region.

Where brands are spending

Facebook feed takes 30.99% of the average fashion ad budget and Instagram feed 23.66%, a gap of 7.33 percentage points. Instagram Stories is third with 17.85%, ahead of Instagram Reels and Facebook Reels.

CPC and CPM by placement

The most cost-efficient placements this quarter:

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

Facebook feed and Facebook Reels rank among the three cheapest placements on both measures. Instagram feed is the most expensive on both, at $0.51 CPC and $6.27 CPM.

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

Click-through rate by placement

Fashion ads click well everywhere: all five placements clear 1%, led by Facebook feed at 2.16% and Instagram Stories at 1.82%.

CTR by placement (Q3 2026):

Cost trends over time

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

Advertising in North America got more expensive during Q3. The regional CPM jumped from $5.15 in July 2026 to $7.10 in September, its highest level in 15 months and about 2.6 times the fashion benchmark’s $2.69. Regional CTR also reached a 15-month high in September, 2.00%, while fashion CTR ended the quarter at 1.40%, its lowest month of Q3. No monthly CPC series is available.

How to use these benchmarks

Treat these medians as a calibration point for fashion brands in North America, 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

On Instagram, carousels are the strongest format and the most used, so keep them at the center and use Reels alongside. On Facebook, Reels and Live Video earn more than the photos that still make up most of what fashion brands publish.

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: 1,176 Facebook brand pages and 1,169 Instagram brand profiles in the fashion category in North 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.