Worldwide Social Media Benchmarks: Coffee & Tea Q3 2026

What’s in this report

Coffee and tea social media benchmarks for Q3 2026 show Instagram holding steady while Facebook fades: the median coffee and tea brand’s Instagram post earned 40 interactions in September, five times the eight on Facebook, Facebook’s lowest of the period. Median engagement reached up to 2.25% on Instagram and up to 0.55% on Facebook across the quarter. Carousels led Instagram by a clear margin, while every Facebook format landed within a few interactions of the others.

This quarterly benchmarks report draws on Emplifi’s dataset of 1,043 Facebook pages and 491 Instagram profiles in the worldwide coffee and tea 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 coffee and tea.

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%. The data counts coffee and tea within beverages, a small category in this breakdown: 2.3% of Facebook brand posts for 2.1% of interactions, and 0.2% of both posts and interactions on Instagram.

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 highest-posting categories. Others combines every remaining category, beverages included.

Platform landscape at a glance

Coffee and tea brands have slightly more fans on Facebook, about 25% more than on Instagram. Instagram profiles post a little more often and collect about five times the interactions over the quarter.

Median post interactions

The median follows the middle-ranked page or profile each month, so a single viral post can’t move it.

Instagram has stayed between 37.5 and 45 for 15 months and finished September at 40. Facebook has lost ground almost every quarter, from 13 in July 2025 to eight in September 2026, the lowest point of the period.

Relative median post interactions

Indexed to its own 15-month high, Instagram ended September at 89% of its October 2025 peak. Facebook finished at 62% of its July 2025 level, its lowest reading.

Median post impressions

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

Instagram posts were displayed slightly more often than Facebook posts in September. Instagram impressions fell from about 2,500 in mid-2025 to a low of 1,138 in May 2026, then recovered to around 1,650 to 1,850 from June. Median Instagram impressions for brands worldwide fell from about 3,900 to about 2,050 over the same 15 months. Facebook has no clear trend: it swung between about 1,100 and 3,700, peaking in June 2026.

Engagement rate trends

Median post engagement rates this quarter:

• Instagram: up to 2.25%
• Facebook: up to 0.55%

Instagram’s median ranged from 1.93% to 2.25% across the quarter, and Facebook’s from 0.42% to 0.55%. Instagram’s rate has roughly doubled since a low of 0.98% in August 2025 and has stayed above 1.9% since February 2026. Facebook’s has swung between 0.42% and 0.88%, and its two lowest months were August and September 2026.

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: No format stands out. Live Video, status updates, photos, Reels and links all earned between 6.5 and nine interactions per post, so on Facebook the content matters more than the format.

Instagram: Carousels led clearly, about 45% ahead of Reels and 80% ahead of single images.

Full organic post type performance (Q3 2026):

Post type distribution trends:

Reels nearly doubled their share of coffee and tea brands’ Facebook posts, from 20.4% in July 2025 to 39.0% in September 2026, while photos fell from 66.9% to 56.8%. On Instagram, carousels grew from 18.2% to 23.5% of posts. Reels are still the most-used format at 45.2%, with single images close to a third.

Top performing pages and profiles

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

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

Bangladeshi tea brands filled the Facebook top three, led by SEYLON TEA Bangladesh. On Instagram, US coffee chains led, with 7 Brew Coffee collecting about twice the interactions of Black Rifle Coffee Company.

Top posts this quarter

Tea campaigns took the Facebook table, while Instagram’s top posts came from a coffee chain promotion, a brand Reel and a relatable morning-routine image.

Facebook:

Instagram:

How does your brand compare?

These benchmarks describe the median coffee and tea brand. 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 coffee and tea-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 follow almost level, 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 placement for both clicks and reach. Instagram Reels is cheap for reach but has the highest CPC, which matters for coffee brands sending people to an app or online shop.

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

Click-through rate by placement

Facebook feed’s click-through rate is more than five times Instagram Reels’, and Facebook Reels is the only other placement above 1%.

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, fell to $1.68 in January 2026 and rebuilt through spring. After a July 2026 dip to $1.90, it rose to its highest level since November in September. CTR climbed from 0.95% in July 2025 to a 15-month high in September 2026, and the brands benchmark tracked both lines slightly lower. No monthly CPC series is available.

How to use these benchmarks

Use these medians as a reference point for coffee and tea brands, 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, carousels are the strongest format and less than a quarter of posts, so they are the obvious place to add volume. On Facebook, switching formats won’t close a gap on its own; the subject and the offer carry more weight.

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: 1,043 Facebook brand pages and 491 Instagram brand profiles in the worldwide coffee and tea 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.