Worldwide Social Media Benchmarks: Airlines Q3 2026

What’s in this report

Airlines social media benchmarks for Q3 2026 show Instagram pulling away from Facebook: the median airline’s Instagram post earned 337 interactions in September, its best month in 15, against 50 on Facebook, its lowest. Median engagement reached up to 1.88% on Instagram and up to 1.15% on Facebook across the quarter. Reels led on Instagram by a short head, while on Facebook the rarely used Live Video, status updates and links all outperformed photos and Reels.

This quarterly benchmarks report draws on Emplifi’s dataset of 552 Facebook pages and 270 Instagram profiles in the worldwide airlines 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 airlines.

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 by a wide margin. Airlines are one of the categories that earn more than their posting weight. They publish 2.1% of brand posts on Facebook and draw 2.7% of interactions; on Instagram, 1.1% of posts bring in 1.4% of interactions.

Facebook interaction distribution (Q3 2026):

Instagram interaction distribution (Q3 2026):

The table shows the five categories with the largest interaction share among those the data breaks out. Others combines every remaining category, airlines included.

Platform landscape at a glance

Airline audiences are the same size on both platforms: the median Facebook page and the median Instagram profile each have about 170,000 followers. Instagram still collects about five times the interactions over the quarter, on a slightly busier posting schedule.

Median post interactions

This metric tracks the middle-ranked page or profile each month, so a few viral accounts can’t distort it.

September 2026 was Instagram’s best month of the 15. The median moved between 251 and 315 from July 2025 to August 2026 before jumping to 337. Facebook went the other way. It held between 78 and 88 through the second half of 2025, slid through 2026 and reached 50 in September, the lowest point of the period.

Relative median post interactions

Indexed to each platform’s own 15-month high, the two lines have split. Instagram ended the quarter at 100% of its peak. Facebook finished at 57% of its November 2025 high, the lowest reading for either platform in the period.

Median post impressions

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

The median airline’s Instagram post was displayed about four and a half times as often as its Facebook post in September. Instagram impressions peaked at 48,018 in August 2025, bottomed out at 21,546 in February 2026 and recovered to 38,413 in July before easing. Facebook impressions have more than halved since July 2025, when the median was 17,801. The decline is not specific to airlines: median Facebook impressions for brands worldwide fell from about 1,500 in July 2025 to 779 in September 2026.

Engagement rate trends

Median post engagement rates this quarter:

• Instagram: up to 1.88%
• Facebook: up to 1.15%

Across the quarter’s three months, Instagram’s median ranged from 1.73% to 1.88% and Facebook’s from 0.91% to 1.15%. Facebook’s August figure was its highest of the 15 months; in every other month it stayed between 0.84% and 1.07%. Instagram’s rate dipped to 1.31% in September 2025 and has mostly held between 1.8% and 2.1% since December 2025.

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 about seven times the median interactions of a photo, but airlines almost never use it: fewer than one in 1,000 of their Facebook posts in September. Status updates and links also beat Reels and photos, yet together they made up less than 3% of posts.

Instagram: The three formats sit close together. Reels led, and single images earned only about 13% less, with carousels in between.

Full organic post type performance (Q3 2026):

Post type distribution trends:

Photos remain the backbone of airline Facebook pages at 48.2% of posts in September 2026, down from 53.1% in July 2025. Reels rose from 12.1% to 19.8%, with most of the gain between September and December 2025. On Instagram, carousels grew from 16.4% to 20.2% of posts, single images slipped from 24.5% to 21.0%, and Reels held near 28%. The export does not break out the remaining post types, so the shares don’t add up to 100%.

Top performing pages and profiles

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

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

Etihad Airways collected almost six times the interactions of the next page on Facebook. On Instagram, Norwegian topped the table with the smallest following of the three, and its football bet with British Airways, below, accounts for more than half of its quarter’s interactions.

Top posts this quarter

Football and family stories ruled. Southwest Airlines’ story of a seven-month-old flying with his pilot father made the top three on both platforms.

Facebook:

Instagram:

How does your brand compare?

These benchmarks describe the median airline. A free social media assessment places your own pages and profiles against them, metric by metric.

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Paid performance: Facebook and Instagram ads

This quarter’s data has no airline-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, more than twice the share of Instagram feed in second place. Facebook Reels and Instagram Reels sit almost level behind them, with Instagram Stories fifth.

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 is the cheapest place to buy a click, at about a quarter of the Instagram Reels price. For an airline that needs clicks through to a booking page, that gap matters more than CPM, where all five placements sit within $1.25 of each other.

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

Click-through rate by placement

Facebook feed and Facebook Reels are the only placements where more than one in 100 impressions turned into a click. All three Instagram placements stayed under one in 200.

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 swung over the 15 months: $1.85 in July 2025, a high of $2.32 in November, a low of $1.68 in January 2026, then back up to its September level after a July dip to $1.90. CTR moved mostly one way, climbing from 0.95% in July 2025 to its highest month in September 2026. The brands benchmark followed both lines a little lower. No monthly CPC series is available.

How to use these benchmarks

Use these medians to see where your airline sits, not as a finish line. Pull the same measures for your own Facebook and Instagram 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, carousels and single images earn similar medians, so no single format explains a gap. On Facebook, where photos make up nearly half the mix but trail on interactions, test status updates, links and the occasional Live Video.

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: 552 Facebook brand pages and 270 Instagram brand profiles in the worldwide airlines 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.