Australia and New Zealand Social Media Benchmarks: Accommodation Q3 2026

What’s in this report

Australia and New Zealand accommodation social media benchmarks for Q3 2026 show Instagram far ahead of Facebook: the median accommodation brand in Australia and New Zealand earned 15 interactions per Instagram post in September, against two on Facebook. Reels and carousels led on Instagram, and giveaways produced five of the quarter’s six top posts. Engagement rates for this category are reported at the worldwide level, where they reached up to 2.15% on Instagram and up to 0.85% on Facebook.

This quarterly benchmarks report draws on Emplifi’s dataset of 446 Facebook pages and 125 Instagram profiles in the Australia and New Zealand accommodation 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 and region worldwide, so it is not specific to accommodation brands in Australia and New Zealand.

Organic performance: Facebook and Instagram

Interaction share by industry

On Instagram, the conversation is spread fairly evenly. Beauty leads with 22.0%, and home and living is the standout, drawing 19.7% of interactions from 6.5% of posts. Emplifi’s data team is reviewing this quarter’s Facebook interaction share for Australia and New Zealand, so this section shows Instagram only.

Instagram interaction distribution (Q3 2026):

The table lists the categories with the most brand posts in the region, ranked by their share of interactions. Others combines every remaining category.

Platform landscape at a glance

Instagram is the stronger channel for accommodation brands in Australia and New Zealand on every measure. The median Instagram profile has about two and a half times the followers of the median Facebook page, publishes more and collects about nine times the interactions over the quarter.

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 moved between 13 and 17 over the 15 months. It dipped to 13 in early 2026, hit its high of 17 in July 2026 and finished September at 15. Facebook held at three every month from July 2025 to August 2026, then slipped to two in September.

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 88% of its July 2026 high. Facebook’s single-step drop from three to two put it at 67% of its peak, 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.

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

Worldwide, accommodation brands’ Instagram impressions are about a third of their August 2025 peak of 6,737, after a steep fall between October 2025 and January 2026. Facebook impressions eased from 1,776 in July 2025 to 949 in September 2026. The decline is not specific to accommodation: median Facebook impressions for brands worldwide fell from about 1,500 to 779 over the same period.

Engagement rate trends

Emplifi’s dataset has too few Australia and New Zealand accommodation profiles with impression data this quarter, so the engagement rates below are the worldwide accommodation medians.

Median post engagement rates this quarter (worldwide accommodation):

• Instagram: up to 2.15%
• Facebook: up to 0.85%

Across the quarter’s three months, the worldwide Instagram median ranged from 1.83% to 2.15% and Facebook’s from 0.72% to 0.85%. The Instagram rate climbed from a low of 0.79% in August 2025, while Facebook stayed within a 0.72% to 0.86% band for all 15 months.

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: Interactions are low across the board. Live Video led with a median of five per post, but it is almost never used (0.02% of posts in September). Links followed at four and Reels at three, while photos and status updates earned two.

Instagram: Reels and carousels were close, at 21 and 20 interactions, and each earned about twice as much as a single image.

Full organic post type performance (Q3 2026):

Post type distribution trends:

Photos made up 68.9% of Facebook posts in September 2026, the lowest share of the period, down from 81.7% in July 2025. Reels took most of that ground, rising from 10.5% to 26.4%, with jumps in October 2025 and again in September 2026. On Instagram, carousels are now the most-used format at 42.2% of posts, up from 31.7%, while single images fell from 42.4% to 28.5% and Reels rose slightly to 29.4%.

Top performing pages and profiles

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

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

Shangri-La Sydney is the only brand in the top three on both platforms. Adina Hotels and Vibe Hotels made the Instagram list with fewer than 15,000 followers each, largely on the strength of one giveaway Reel apiece.

Top posts this quarter

Giveaways dominated the quarter. Five of the six top posts invited people to like, tag or share for a chance to win a stay or a spa day.

Facebook:

Instagram:

The Manor House’s competition post alone accounts for 90% of the page’s quarterly interactions.

How does your brand compare?

These benchmarks describe the median accommodation brand in Australia and New Zealand. 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

This quarter’s data has no accommodation-specific ad benchmark, so the paid figures below come from Emplifi’s Australia and New Zealand ad accounts benchmark, which spans ad accounts in every industry in the region.

Where brands are spending

Facebook feed takes 42.4% of the average ad budget, 28.6 percentage points more than Instagram feed in second place. Facebook Reels and Instagram Reels follow, and Facebook Marketplace makes the top five with 8.2%.

CPC and CPM by placement

The most cost-efficient placements this quarter:

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

Facebook Marketplace delivers impressions at well under half the cost of any other top placement, but its CTR is 0.06%, so its clicks cost about three times as much as a Facebook feed click.

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

Click-through rate by placement

Facebook feed is the only placement above 2%. Facebook Reels clears 1%, and both Instagram placements sit near 0.6%.

CTR by placement (Q3 2026):

Cost trends over time

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

Australia and New Zealand CPM rose from $3.20 in July 2025, the low of the period, to a peak of $4.57 in June 2026, with a dip to $3.34 in January 2026. It finished September at $4.22, about double the worldwide brands benchmark. CTR moved from a low of 0.87% in September 2025 to a high of 1.30% in December 2025 and has stayed between 1.14% and 1.30% since. No monthly CPC series is available.

How to use these benchmarks

Treat these medians as a calibration point for accommodation 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

Instagram is where the interactions are, so put Reels and carousels first. If you run giveaways, note how heavily the quarter’s top posts relied on them and track whether the followers they bring keep engaging afterwards.

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: 446 Facebook brand pages and 125 Instagram brand profiles in the Australia and New Zealand accommodation 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.