Worldwide Social Media Benchmarks: Auto Dealership Q3 2026

What’s in this report

Auto dealership social media benchmarks for Q3 2026 show a wide gap between the two platforms: the median dealership’s Instagram post earned 17 interactions in September, matching its best month in 15, against three on Facebook. Median engagement reached up to 1.46% on Instagram and up to 0.60% on Facebook across the quarter. Reels led on Instagram, and Live Video was the only Facebook format to reach double digits.

This quarterly benchmarks report draws on Emplifi’s dataset of 3,556 Facebook pages and 875 Instagram profiles in the worldwide auto dealership 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 auto dealerships.

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 with more than 40%. Auto, the closest category to dealerships in this breakdown, takes 4.1% of Facebook interactions and 5.1% on Instagram. Auto dealerships are not broken out as a separate category.

Facebook interaction distribution (Q3 2026):

Instagram interaction distribution (Q3 2026):

The table shows the five categories with the largest interaction share among the region’s six highest-posting categories. Others combines every remaining category.

Platform landscape at a glance

Dealerships have slightly bigger audiences on Instagram, where the median profile has about 35% more followers than the median Facebook page. Posting rates are almost identical, yet Instagram collects more than five times the interactions over the quarter.

Median post interactions

The median follows the middle-ranked page or profile each month, so a few viral dealers can’t lift it.

Both lines are remarkably flat. Instagram stayed between 14 and 17 for all 15 months and reached 17 in August and September 2026. Facebook has sat at three or four interactions per post since July 2025.

Relative median post interactions

Instagram ended September at 100% of its 15-month high. Facebook ended at 75% of its peak, a reflection of how small the numbers are: the difference between three and four interactions.

Median post impressions

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

The median Instagram post was displayed about twice as often as a Facebook post in September. Instagram impressions peaked at 1,539 in November 2025, fell to about 750 in early 2026 and have moved between about 560 and 790 since. Facebook has stayed between about 300 and 420 for the whole period, so dealership pages have lost less reach than many brands: 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 1.46%
• Facebook: up to 0.60%

Instagram’s median ranged from 1.42% to 1.46% across the quarter, and Facebook’s from 0.55% to 0.60%. Instagram’s rate climbed from about 1% in the second half of 2025 to a high of 1.68% in May 2026 before easing. Facebook stayed between 0.50% and 0.71% 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 earned more than three times the median interactions of any other format, though it made up just 0.2% of dealerships’ Facebook posts in September. Status updates and Reels tied for second, and photos, the most-posted format, tied with links for last.

Instagram: Reels led, with carousels close behind. Both earned well over twice the interactions of a single image.

Full organic post type performance (Q3 2026):

Post type distribution trends:

Photos still make up 63.3% of dealerships’ Facebook posts, down from 74.9% in July 2025. Reels more than doubled their share, from 14.2% to 32.3%, with a jump from 12.2% to 24.9% between September and October 2025. On Instagram, Reels grew from 37.8% to 43.8% of posts and single images fell from 33.1% to 29.5%. Carousels held at about 27%.

Top performing pages and profiles

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

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

The tables mix tire chains, supercar dealers and used-car sellers. Thailand’s หนุ่ม เม้งการยางชลบุรี reached third place on Facebook by posting 926 times in the quarter, about ten a day.

Top posts this quarter

Supercars and humor did best. Three of the six top posts featured supercars, and five of the six were Reels.

Facebook:

Instagram:

How does your brand compare?

These benchmarks describe the median auto dealership. 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 auto dealership-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 double Instagram feed in second. Facebook Reels and Instagram Reels are almost tied for third, and Instagram Stories is 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

For a dealership that wants test-drive and inventory clicks, Facebook feed and Facebook Reels are the cheapest places to buy them. Instagram Reels is cheap to reach people with but has the highest CPC of the five.

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

Click-through rate by placement

Both Facebook placements clear 1%. None of the three Instagram placements reaches 0.5%.

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, dropped to $1.68 in January 2026 and rose back to $2.15 by June. After a July dip to $1.90, it climbed to its highest level since November in September. CTR rose from 0.95% in July 2025 to its 15-month high in September 2026, and the brands benchmark tracked the same path slightly lower. No monthly CPC series is available.

How to use these benchmarks

Use these medians as a reference point for dealerships, not a ceiling. Pull the same measures 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

On Instagram, the gap between video and single images is large, so Reels and carousels of stock and deliveries are the obvious default. On Facebook, every everyday format earns only a handful of interactions; a regular Live Video, such as a walkaround of new arrivals, is the format most likely to move the number.

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: 3,556 Facebook brand pages and 875 Instagram brand profiles in the worldwide auto dealership 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.