Beauty Industry Social Media Benchmarks 2026: Engagement Rates by Platform
Written by: Tim Eisenhauer
Last updated:
What is a good social media engagement rate for the beauty industry in 2026?
The median beauty brand earns 0.14% engagement per Instagram post according to Rival IQ, or 0.2% according to Dash Social. That’s among the lowest of any industry either company tracks. TikTok is the bright spot: 3.9% average engagement and 113,800 video views per post in Dash Social’s data. Facebook sits at 0.02%. X rounds to 0.00%. And no major benchmark report publishes a LinkedIn number for beauty at all. The most photographed, most filmed, most influencer-saturated industry on the internet has brand accounts that get almost no engagement, and the engagement that exists lives almost entirely on TikTok.
When I built our social media benchmarks post covering 30 industries, beauty stood out for the opposite reason real estate did. Real estate barely shows up in benchmark reports. Beauty shows up in all of them. It’s the first column in every cross-industry table, the flagship vertical for every company selling social media software. Sephora, rhode, LANEIGE, Sol de Janeiro: these are the logos on the benchmark publishers’ customer pages.
So beauty should have the cleanest data of any industry. I pulled Dash Social’s dedicated “Beauty Industry” benchmark report, all 35 pages of it, to check.
Beauty does get more coverage than most industries: brand-by-brand engagement charts, breakdowns by account size, even a separate table for celebrity beauty brands. But the structural problems are the same ones I found in the real estate report. The methodology page says the sample covers TikTok (n=1,170), Instagram (n=2,978), and YouTube (n=644) across twelve industries combined. How many of those are beauty brands? Not disclosed. And here’s my favorite part: the “Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn and X at a Glance” section of the Beauty Industry report contains zero beauty-specific data. Every table in that section is an all-industries average. The dedicated beauty benchmark report cannot tell you a beauty brand’s Facebook engagement rate.
Keep that in mind while you read every number below. The companies producing this data sell social media software. They need the data to exist more than they need it to be rigorous. I run a social media software company too, so I’m familiar with the incentive. The difference is I’ll tell you where the data is thin.
Beauty industry social media benchmarks by platform
Two main sources cover beauty. Rival IQ reports the median engagement rate across 150 “Health & Beauty” companies, calculated as interactions divided by followers. Dash Social reports averages from their own customer-skewed sample, with a different engagement formula per platform. The numbers are not comparable to each other, which is why they get separate columns.
| Platform | Rival IQ (median, interactions ÷ followers) | Dash Social (average, platform-specific formula) |
|---|---|---|
| 0.14% | 0.2% | |
| TikTok | 0.85% | 3.9% |
| 0.02% | not reported for beauty | |
| X/Twitter | 0.00% | not reported for beauty |
| not tracked | not reported for beauty |
Rival IQ: 2025 Social Media Industry Benchmark Report, “Health & Beauty” category. Dash Social: 2025 Beauty Industry Benchmark Report, data period July to December 2024. Dash Social’s TikTok formula divides engagement by video views, not followers, which is why the numbers diverge so sharply.
For posting frequency, the sources don’t agree either. Rival IQ has beauty brands posting 6.04 times per week on Instagram, 2.94 on Facebook, 3.15 on TikTok, and 0.00 on X. Dash Social has 10 Instagram posts per week (6 Reels plus 4 carousels or images) and 6 TikToks. Either way, beauty posts more than almost any industry outside media. It just doesn’t get much back.
Instagram engagement rate benchmarks for beauty brands
A typical beauty brand earns 0.14% to 0.2% engagement per Instagram post, the lowest tier of any tracked industry, and even the best beauty brands top out around 1.8%.
The detail that explains it: the average beauty brand in Dash Social’s Instagram sample has 2.4 million followers. That’s the largest or near-largest follower base of any industry in the report, paired with the smallest engagement rate. Beauty brands spent a decade accumulating enormous audiences, and those audiences are now mostly dormant. If you have 10,000 followers at 0.2%, that’s 20 interactions per post.
The numbers from Dash Social’s beauty Instagram data, for what they’re worth:
| Metric | Beauty |
|---|---|
| Engagement Rate | 0.2% |
| Average Followers | 2.4M |
| Monthly Follower Growth | 0.6% |
| Weekly Reels | 6 |
| Weekly Carousel/Image | 4 |
| Reach per Post | 75.1K |
Engagement = (Likes + Comments) / Followers. Reach figure comes from customer data only.
Beauty posts more Reels per week than any industry in the report except media. Ten posts a week for 0.2% engagement is a lot of content for very little visible return. The top five beauty brands by Instagram engagement in the report (House of Sillage at 1.8%, Scent Beauty at 1.6%, Sol de Janeiro at 1.3%, Gisou at 1.2%, Topicals at 1.1%) share a pattern: smaller, fragrance-and-personality-led accounts rather than the mega-brands. Celebrity beauty brands average 0.8%, with rhode at 2.3% leading on the strength of founder-face content.
One finding worth acting on: in Rival IQ’s format data, Health & Beauty is the only industry where photos still lead on Instagram, with Reels close behind. The carousel-first advice that fits most industries doesn’t fit beauty. A clean product shot still works here. More on how Apaya handles Instagram publishing for brands is here.
Facebook engagement rate benchmarks for beauty brands
Beauty brands average 0.02% organic engagement on Facebook, roughly 2 interactions per 10,000 followers, and Dash Social’s dedicated beauty report publishes no beauty Facebook data at all.
That 0.02% comes from Rival IQ. It’s tied for the lowest Facebook engagement of any industry they track, alongside fashion, home decor, retail, and tech. Beauty brands still post there 2.94 times per week, presumably out of habit.
This is the keyword people search constantly: “beauty brand Facebook Instagram engagement rate benchmark.” Here’s the full extent of what the published data supports: Instagram is 0.14% to 0.2%, and Facebook is 0.02% with exactly one source willing to put a beauty-specific number on it. Hootsuite reports a 1.30% cross-industry Facebook average using a per-post methodology, but Hootsuite doesn’t track beauty as a category, so there’s no beauty-specific number to compare.
What to do with a 0.02% channel: keep the page alive. It’s social proof, it’s customer service surface area, and it’s the account infrastructure your Meta ads run through. Just stop measuring yourself against organic Facebook results, because the entire industry has effectively none.
TikTok engagement rate benchmarks for beauty brands
TikTok is the strongest organic platform for beauty brands, with 3.9% average engagement and 113,800 average video views per post, and the top beauty brands earn between 8.2% and 8.8%.
The full picture from Dash Social’s beauty TikTok data:
| Metric | Beauty |
|---|---|
| Engagement Rate | 3.9% |
| Video Views per Post | 113.8K |
| Average Followers | 435.7K |
| Monthly Follower Growth | 3.0% |
| Weekly Posts | 6 |
| Reach per Post | 71.2K |
Engagement = (Likes + Comments + Shares) / Video Views. Reach figure comes from customer data only.
Note the formula. TikTok engagement is measured against views, not followers, so it can’t be compared to the Instagram number. Rival IQ’s per-follower TikTok median for Health & Beauty is 0.85%. Both can be true at once.
The shape of the data is the story. The average beauty brand has 435,700 TikTok followers and gets 113,800 views per post. That’s distribution Instagram stopped giving brands years ago: your content reaching far beyond the people who already follow you. Beauty brands also grow followers 5x faster on TikTok than on Instagram (3.0% monthly versus 0.6%).
And unlike Instagram, bigger is better here. Large beauty brands (110K+ followers) average 5.2% engagement versus 3.1% for growing brands, and they post 7 times a week versus 2. The top brands by engagement (Dr.Jart+ at 8.8%, Tatcha at 8.7%, LANEIGE US at 8.5%, Gisou at 8.3%, Sol de Janeiro at 8.2%) are doing skincare routines, ingredient breakdowns, and quick product demos with personality. Celebrity brands do even better: florence by mills averages 10.6% engagement, riding founder content from Millie Bobby Brown. The pattern across every winner is a person on camera doing something with the product, not a product render with trending audio. If TikTok isn’t in your rotation yet, here’s how Apaya publishes to it.
LinkedIn benchmarks for beauty brands
No major benchmark report publishes a LinkedIn engagement rate for the beauty industry. The data does not exist.
Hootsuite tracks LinkedIn engagement for 13 industries, from construction to government. Beauty isn’t one of them. Rival IQ doesn’t cover LinkedIn. Dash Social’s beauty report includes a LinkedIn page, but it shows only the all-industries average (6.0% engagement against impressions), with no beauty row.
I can’t give you a number nobody has measured, and I’m not going to invent one. What I can tell you: for consumer beauty brands, LinkedIn is a hiring and PR channel, not an engagement channel, and skipping it is defensible. For B2B beauty (salon suppliers, private label manufacturers, ingredient companies), LinkedIn is where your buyers spend work hours, and the complete absence of competition from the rest of the industry is an argument for testing it, not avoiding it.
X (Twitter) benchmarks for beauty brands
Beauty brand engagement on X rounds to 0.00%, the median beauty brand posts there zero times per week, and the industry has functionally abandoned the platform.
Rival IQ’s numbers are blunt: 0.00% median engagement, 0.00 posts per week. Not low. Zero, to two decimal places, on both metrics. Dash Social’s beauty report doesn’t publish beauty-specific X data either; its all-industries X table shows brand follower counts shrinking month over month.
There’s no strategy debate to have here. The data says beauty brands tried X, got nothing, and left. Beauty conversation on X still exists, but it happens between people, not between brands and audiences. Unless you have a specific community reason to be there, the hours belong on TikTok and Instagram.
What good, median, and poor engagement looks like for beauty brands
With all the caveats above, here’s how to read your own numbers against the published data. These tiers come straight from the source reports: the medians are the medians, and “top performer” is literally where the named top-five brands landed.
| Platform | Poor | Median | Good | Top performer |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Instagram (per follower) | below 0.1% | 0.14% to 0.2% | 0.5%+ | 1.1% to 1.8% |
| TikTok (per view) | below 2% | around 3.9% | 5%+ | 8.2% to 8.8% |
| Facebook (per follower) | 0% | 0.02% | anything measurable | no data |
| no data | no data | no data | no data | |
| X | the median is zero | 0.00% | not applicable | not applicable |
Two warnings before you grade yourself. First, the Instagram sample averages 2.4 million followers. If you’re a boutique brand with 8,000 followers, your engagement rate should be meaningfully higher than these numbers, because small engaged audiences always out-rate large dormant ones. Beating 0.2% with 8,000 followers isn’t an achievement; it’s the baseline. Second, these are averages and medians from undisclosed sample sizes over a six-month window in 2024, published in 2025, read by you in 2026. Treat the tiers as rough terrain, not a scoreboard.
How beauty brands can improve engagement rates
Move weight to TikTok and Reels. TikTok is the only platform where the beauty data shows organic distribution beyond your followers: 113,800 views per post against 435,700 average followers. Every hour you spend perfecting a Facebook post that 0.02% of your audience will touch is an hour that belonged to short-form video.
Put a person on camera. The top beauty brands by engagement are doing routines, ingredient education, and demos with comedic timing. The celebrity brand data makes the same point from a different angle: florence by mills at 10.6% and rhode at 2.3% are founder-face brands. You don’t need a celebrity. You need a recurring human face your audience recognizes.
Keep photos in the Instagram mix. Beauty is the one industry where Rival IQ’s data shows photos still leading on Instagram. The “Reels or nothing” advice is wrong for this vertical. A clean product photo is still the cheapest high-performing asset you can make.
Stop posting to X. The median beauty brand already has. Reassign the time.
Post consistently, especially during launch season. Beauty brands average 10 Instagram posts and 6 TikToks per week. That volume is hard to sustain through a product launch, a holiday season, and a reformulation crisis at the same time, which is exactly when feeds go quiet. Automating the scheduling keeps the cadence alive when your team is buried.
Benchmark against yourself, not the industry. The only number that reliably means something is whether this month beat last month. That’s what Apaya’s analytics track: your trajectory, not a phantom average built from undisclosed samples. And if you’re managing a portfolio of beauty brands or a multi-brand house, enterprise social media analytics rolls every brand’s trajectory into one view, so you can see which brand’s content is working without opening twelve dashboards.
Every number in this post came from a company that sells social media software, and I run one too. The difference is I’m telling you which cells in the table are empty instead of papering over them.
What else beauty brands ask about social media benchmarks
What is a good Instagram engagement rate for beauty brands?
The median is 0.14% to 0.2% depending on the source, both calculated as interactions divided by followers. The top five beauty brands in Dash Social’s data range from 1.1% to 1.8%, so anything above 1% is top-performer territory by their math. If your account is small, you should be beating the median comfortably, because the benchmark sample averages 2.4 million followers.
What is a good TikTok engagement rate for beauty brands?
Dash Social reports a 3.9% beauty average, with large brands at 5.2% and the top five between 8.2% and 8.8%. Their formula divides likes, comments, and shares by video views. Rival IQ’s per-follower median is 0.85%. Know which formula your analytics tool uses before comparing yourself to either.
Should beauty brands still post on Facebook?
Organic engagement is 0.02% in the only source that publishes a beauty-specific number. Keep the page as ad infrastructure and social proof, post enough to look alive, and spend your creative energy elsewhere.
How often do beauty brands post on social media?
A lot. Dash Social shows 10 Instagram posts (6 Reels, 4 static) and 6 TikToks per week; Rival IQ shows about 6 Instagram posts, 3 TikToks, and 3 Facebook posts. Beauty is one of the highest-volume industries in social media. Consistency matters more than matching that volume, and the brands that win sustain their cadence through busy seasons instead of posting in bursts.
Are these benchmarks reliable?
Directionally, yes. As precise targets, no. Different formulas, different samples, undisclosed beauty-specific sample sizes, and a data window that’s already more than a year old. Even the dedicated beauty industry report has no beauty data for Facebook, LinkedIn, or X. Use the numbers as a sanity check, then go back to tracking your own month-over-month trend. That’s the benchmark that pays.
Sources
- Rival IQ — 2025 Social Media Industry Benchmark Report
- Dash Social — 2025 Social Media Benchmark Report, Beauty
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