North America Social Media Benchmarks: Entertainment Q3 2026

What’s in this report

North America entertainment social media benchmarks for Q3 2026 show Instagram earning 512 interactions on the median brand post in September, against 30 on Facebook. Median engagement reached up to 3.33% on Instagram and up to 0.89% on Facebook, Facebook’s highest rate in 15 months. Carousels beat Reels on Instagram, Reels led on Facebook, and MrBeast posted the three top Facebook posts of the quarter.

This quarterly benchmarks report draws on Emplifi’s dataset of 2,305 Facebook pages and 2,408 Instagram profiles of entertainment brands in North America, 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, covering 68 to 83 accounts per metric. The benchmark includes brands in every category worldwide, so the uplifts are not specific to entertainment or to North America.

Organic performance: Facebook and Instagram

Platform landscape at a glance

The median entertainment brand in North America has about 285,000 Instagram followers and about 180,000 Facebook fans. It posts more on Facebook, 44 times in the quarter against 30, but Instagram returns more than 10 times the interactions.

Median post interactions

This metric follows the middle-ranked page or profile each month, so a handful of viral accounts can’t inflate it.

Instagram held between 506.5 and 611.5 interactions per post over the 15 months. It opened Q3 at 602 and closed at 512, near the bottom of that range. Facebook was even steadier at 35 to 38 for most of the period, then dropped to 30 in September, its lowest month.

Relative median post interactions

Indexing each platform to its own 15-month peak makes the two easier to compare despite their different scales.

Instagram ended September 2026 at 84% of its January 2026 high, and its lowest point in the period was 83%. Facebook finished at 79% of its peak, the weakest reading for either platform.

Median post impressions

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

Instagram impressions recovered from a February 2026 low of 5,201 to a 15-month high of 8,368 in August, then eased to about 7,499 in September. Facebook impressions hit their own 15-month high of 618 in July 2026 and fell to 414 by September, the lowest point of the period. The decline is broad: median Facebook impressions for all brands in North America fell from 249 in July 2025 to 133 in September 2026.

Engagement rate trends

Median post engagement rates this quarter:

• Instagram: up to 3.33%
• Facebook: up to 0.89%

Across the quarter, Instagram’s median ranged from 3.09% to 3.33% and Facebook’s from 0.71% to 0.89%. Instagram’s rate jumped between December 2025 and January 2026 and has stayed above 3% since, peaking at 3.40% in April 2026, up from a low of 1.99% in September 2025. Facebook’s August rate of 0.89% was the highest of the 15 months, up from 0.60% in July 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: Reels led with a median of 36 interactions per post, ahead of photos at 30 and Live Video at 29. Status updates and links trailed.

Instagram: Carousels earned a median of 881 interactions, about a third more than Reels at 671 and nearly four times a single image.

Full organic post type performance (Q3 2026):

Post type distribution trends:

Reels became the most-used Facebook format for entertainment brands in North America during 2026. Their share rose from 25.7% of posts in July 2025 to 38.7% in October 2025 and 44.8% in September 2026, while photos fell from 51.3% to 42.8% and status updates from 11.3% to 5.2%. On Instagram, Reels make up 61.8% of posts, carousels 25.6% and single images 12.5%.

Top performing pages and profiles

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

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

MrBeast topped Facebook with 29.4 million interactions from 118 posts, while SportsCenter and Entertainment Tonight each published well over 1,000. On Instagram, SportsCenter’s 302.3 million interactions are almost three times those of The Tonight Show in second place.

Top posts this quarter

MrBeast’s three Reels took every top Facebook spot, each above 2.3 million interactions. On Instagram, a SportsCenter Reel led with about 12.5 million, followed by a MrBeast carousel and a Tonight Show clip.

Facebook:

Instagram:

How does your brand compare?

These benchmarks describe the median entertainment brand in North America. A free social media assessment shows where your own profiles sit against them, platform by platform.

Get your free social media assessment

Paid performance: Facebook and Instagram ads

The placement figures below come from Emplifi’s entertainment ad accounts benchmark, which pools entertainment ad accounts across all regions, so they are not specific to North America.

Where brands are spending

Facebook feed takes 24.70% of the average entertainment ad budget, just ahead of Instagram Reels at 22.45%. Instagram feed (17.51%), Facebook Reels (14.68%) and Instagram Stories (11.68%) make up the rest of the top five.

CPC and CPM by placement

The most cost-efficient placements this quarter:

• Lowest CPC: Facebook feed, Facebook Reels and Instagram Stories
• Lowest CPM: Instagram Reels, Facebook Reels and Instagram feed

Facebook feed pairs the cheapest clicks, $0.16, with the highest CPM of the five, $3.59. Instagram Reels and Instagram feed cost the most per click, at $0.75 and $0.72.

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

Click-through rate by placement

Facebook feed’s CTR of 2.55% is the clear leader, with Facebook Reels at 1.70%. Instagram placements range from 0.46% to 0.52%.

CTR by placement (Q3 2026):

Cost trends over time

The ad trend files have no entertainment series, so the table compares the North America overall benchmark, covering ad accounts in every industry in the region, with Emplifi’s all-brands benchmark, which pools brand ad accounts across all regions. Figures are for September 2026, with the quarter’s monthly range:

North America’s CPM jumped from $5.15 in July 2026 to $7.10 in September, its highest level in 15 months and more than three times the all-brands benchmark. The regional low was $4.82 in January 2026. Regional CTR also hit a 15-month high in September, 2.00%, up from 1.39% in July 2025. No monthly CPC series is available.

How to use these benchmarks

Treat these medians as a calibration point for entertainment brands in North America, not a ceiling. Pull the same measures for your own Facebook and Instagram profiles and set them against the September 2026 figures above:

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

On Instagram, carousels earn more per post than Reels but make up only a quarter of output, so they are the obvious format to test more. On Facebook, Reels, photos and Live Video all perform within a few interactions of each other, so no single format is a clear winner.

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: 2,305 Facebook brand pages and 2,408 Instagram brand profiles in the entertainment category in North America, 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.