Europe Social Media Benchmarks: Beauty Q3 2026

What’s in this report

Europe beauty social media benchmarks for Q3 2026 put Instagram far ahead of Facebook: the median beauty brand’s Instagram post earned 41.5 interactions in September, against four on Facebook. Median engagement reached up to 1.81% on Instagram and up to 0.86% on Facebook across the quarter. Carousels and Reels finished almost level on Instagram, while Facebook interactions per post slid to the lowest level in 15 months.

This quarterly benchmarks report draws on Emplifi’s dataset of 2,075 Facebook pages and 1,522 Instagram profiles in the beauty category in Europe, 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, across 68 to 83 accounts per metric. The benchmark pools brands from every category and region, so the uplifts are not specific to beauty brands in Europe.

Organic performance: Facebook and Instagram

Interaction share by industry

Ecommerce and finance brands split the biggest shares of brand interactions on Facebook in Europe, each close to a fifth. On Instagram, retail and ecommerce lead with about a sixth each. Beauty is the second-busiest poster on Instagram, with 15.3% of brand posts, but collects 9.7% of interactions. Facebook tells the opposite story: beauty publishes only 1.7% of brand posts there yet draws 3.3% of interactions.

Facebook interaction distribution (Q3 2026):

Instagram interaction distribution (Q3 2026):

The categories listed are those with the most brand posts in Europe. Others combines every remaining category, including beauty on Facebook, where it is not among the six biggest posters.

Platform landscape at a glance

Instagram is where beauty brands in Europe build their audience. The median profile has about 57% more followers than the median Facebook page and publishes 10 more posts a quarter, and it collects more than 14 times the interactions.

Median post interactions

This is the monthly median across brands, so a few viral accounts can’t pull it up.

Instagram has held a narrow band for 15 months. It peaked at 44 in October 2025, January 2026 and March 2026, eased to 39 in August 2026 and recovered to 41.5 in September. Facebook has lost ground steadily, from seven in July 2025 to four in August and September 2026, its lowest level of the period.

Relative median post interactions

Measured against each platform’s own 15-month high, Instagram finished September 2026 at 94% of its peak. Facebook ended at 57%, the low point of the period for either platform.

Median post impressions

Impressions count how many times posts were shown, whether or not anyone engaged. They describe reach, not engagement.

Facebook impressions have fallen every month since January 2026, when the median peaked at 1,740, and September’s 648 is the lowest of the 15 months. Instagram impressions dropped from a peak of 4,630 in August 2025 to about 2,500 to 2,800 a month through Q3 2026. The decline is not specific to beauty: across all brands in Europe, median Facebook impressions fell from 1,808 in July 2025 to 1,025 in September 2026.

Engagement rate trends

Median post engagement rates this quarter:

• Instagram: up to 1.81%
• Facebook: up to 0.86%

Within the quarter, Instagram’s median ranged from 1.50% to 1.81% and Facebook’s from 0.77% to 0.86%. Instagram’s rate has climbed from a low of 1.14% in September 2025 to the period’s high in September 2026. Facebook’s rate reached its 15-month high in August 2026, up from a low of 0.67% in January.

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 drew a median of 14 interactions, almost three times any other format, but it made up just 0.1% of beauty brands’ Facebook posts in September. Links edged out photos and Reels, and status updates came last.

Instagram: Carousels and Reels finished a single interaction apart, and both outperformed single images by a clear margin.

Full organic post type performance (Q3 2026):

Post type distribution trends:

Reels have doubled their share of beauty brands’ Facebook posts, from 20.4% in July 2025 to 42.0% in September 2026, with the biggest jump between September and October 2025. Photos fell from 64.7% to 52.3% over the same period, and status updates dropped below 2%. On Instagram, Reels held steady at 45% to 48% of posts, carousels rose from 20.9% to 27.4% and single images slipped from 28.9% to 23.0%.

Top performing pages and profiles

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

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

Semilac, a Polish nail brand, collected about two thirds of its Facebook total from a single post, the top post below.

Top posts this quarter

Simple polls ruled Facebook, while the top Instagram posts were carousels and Reels built around a story.

Facebook:

Instagram:

How does your brand compare?

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Paid performance: Facebook and Instagram ads

Ad benchmarks here come from Emplifi’s beauty ad accounts benchmark, which pools beauty ad accounts across all regions, so these placement figures are not specific to Europe. The cost trends below set that benchmark against Europe overall.

Where brands are spending

Facebook feed takes almost a third of the average beauty ad budget, 13.3 percentage points more than Instagram feed in second place. Instagram Reels, Facebook Reels and Instagram Stories each take 10% to 13%.

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, Instagram Reels and Facebook Reels

Instagram Reels is the cheapest Instagram placement to buy reach on, but not clicks: its CPC is more than three times Facebook feed’s.

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

Click-through rate by placement

Facebook feed’s CTR of 1.40% is the only one above 1%. Instagram Reels converts the fewest viewers into clicks, at 0.23%.

CTR by placement (Q3 2026):

Cost trends over time

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

Beauty CPM has been volatile. It peaked at $2.47 in December 2025, dropped to $1.21 in March 2026 and ended September at $1.80 after an August dip. Europe overall ran higher throughout, peaking at $3.14 in November 2025 and finishing at $2.90.

CTR moved in opposite directions: the beauty benchmark fell from 0.98% in July to 0.81% in September, while Europe overall rose from 0.99% in July 2025 to 1.29%, close to its August 2026 high. No monthly CPC series is available.

How to use these benchmarks

Use these medians as a reference point for a beauty brand in Europe, not a target to stop at. Pull the same September 2026 measures for your own profiles:

• Median post interactions
• Median post impressions
• Median engagement rate
• Post type mix

If Instagram trails the median, test more carousels next to your Reels; the two formats now perform almost the same. If Facebook trails, look at links and the occasional Live Video before adding more photos.

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: 2,075 Facebook brand pages and 1,522 Instagram brand profiles in the beauty category in Europe, 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.