Worldwide Social Media Benchmarks: Airport Q3 2026

What’s in this report

Airport social media benchmarks for Q3 2026 put Instagram well ahead of Facebook: the median airport’s Instagram post earned 140 interactions in September, almost four times the 36 on Facebook. Median engagement reached up to 3.52% on Instagram and up to 1.92% on Facebook across the quarter. Unusually, plain photos and single images were the top organic formats on both platforms.

This quarterly benchmarks report draws on Emplifi’s dataset of 357 Facebook pages and 198 Instagram profiles in the worldwide airport 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 airports.

Organic performance: Facebook and Instagram

Platform landscape at a glance

Airports have the bigger audience on Facebook, where the median page has about 80% more fans than the median Instagram profile. Both post at almost the same rate. Instagram still collects about twice the interactions over the quarter.

Median post interactions

The median follows the middle-ranked page or profile each month, so one viral account can’t drag it up.

Instagram’s median has trended up with plenty of month-to-month noise. It started at 108 in July 2025, peaked at 153 in May 2026 and closed the quarter at 140. Facebook moved in a tight band of 40.5 to 51 for 14 months, then fell to 36 in September, its lowest point of the period.

Relative median post interactions

Measured against its own 15-month high, Instagram ended September at 92% of its May 2026 peak. Facebook finished at 71% of its December 2025 and January 2026 high, 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.

Impressions show the clearest gap between the two platforms: the median airport Instagram post was displayed about 11 times as often as a Facebook post in September. Instagram has swung between about 3,900 and 9,100 since July 2025 without a clear direction. Facebook climbed to 1,908 in March 2026, then dropped below 450 in every month of Q3. Median Facebook impressions fell for brands worldwide over the same period, from about 1,500 to 779, though less steeply than for airports.

Engagement rate trends

Median post engagement rates this quarter:

• Instagram: up to 3.52%
• Facebook: up to 1.92%

Instagram’s median ranged from 2.48% to 3.52% across the quarter, and Facebook’s from 1.55% to 1.92%. Both rates are volatile, partly because the airport sample is small. Instagram’s August figure was its highest of the 15 months, up from a low of 1.15% in October 2025. Facebook peaked at 2.31% in June 2026 and has otherwise stayed between 1.26% and 2.12%.

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: Photos led, with Reels second and status updates and links close behind. Live Video came last, so airports gain little from going live on Facebook on this quarter’s evidence.

Instagram: Single images edged out Reels and carousels, though only 14 interactions separate first from third.

Full organic post type performance (Q3 2026):

Post type distribution trends:

Photos make up two thirds of airport Facebook posts (67.0% in September 2026, down from 74.3% in July 2025). Reels rose from 14.3% to 26.2%, with the biggest step between September and October 2025. On Instagram, Reels grew from 35.8% to 38.6% of posts and carousels from 29.2% to 31.7%, while single images, the best performer, slipped from 35.0% to 29.7%.

Top performing pages and profiles

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

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

Oslo Airport led both tables on 22 posts, almost entirely because of one post: the welcome-home message below accounts for about 97% of its Facebook interactions and 99% of its Instagram interactions for the quarter.

Top posts this quarter

Arrivals were the story of the quarter: national teams, a football star and new aircraft liveries all touching down.

Facebook:

Instagram:

How does your brand compare?

These benchmarks describe the median airport. A free social media assessment shows where your own pages and profiles sit against them, platform by platform.

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Paid performance: Facebook and Instagram ads

This quarter’s data has no airport-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, and Instagram feed less than half of that. Facebook Reels and Instagram Reels sit almost level in third and fourth, 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 best-value placement on both measures: the lowest CPC and the lowest CPM of the five. Instagram Reels is the outlier, with a CPM close to Facebook’s but the most expensive clicks.

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

Click-through rate by placement

Facebook placements turn impressions into clicks far more often. Facebook feed’s CTR is more than five times Instagram Reels’.

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 peaked at $2.32 in November 2025, bottomed out at $1.68 in January 2026, then rose through spring before a July dip to $1.90 and a September rebound. CTR climbed from 0.95% in July 2025 to its 15-month high in September 2026. The brands benchmark followed the same shape at slightly lower levels. No monthly CPC series is available.

How to use these benchmarks

Treat these medians as a reference point for airports, not a ceiling. Pull the same numbers 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

For airports, still images held their own against video this quarter, so don’t drop photos by default. Watch Facebook reach closely: with the median post shown fewer than 400 times in September, a page’s own impressions will tell you more than its interaction count.

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: 357 Facebook brand pages and 198 Instagram brand profiles in the worldwide airport 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.