Average engagement rate benchmarks: 13 industries (2026) – Hootsuite Blog

What’s the average engagement rate? See 2026 benchmarks across 13 industries for Instagram, TikTok and more, plus a free calculator.
Engagement rate is the percentage of your audience that interacts with a piece of content, rather than just scrolling past it. It’s calculated by dividing total interactions by a measure of audience size (usually followers, reach, or impressions), then multiplying by 100.
What counts as an interaction depends on the platform, but it typically includes:
The key thing to remember is that engagement rate measures quality of attention relative to audience size, which is why a small account can easily outperform a much larger one.
Use our free engagement rate calculator to find out your engagement rate 4 ways fast. Calculate it on a post-by-post basis or for an entire campaign — for any social network.
Engagement rate matters because it’s one of the few social media metrics that tells you whether your content actually connected with people. Follower counts and impressions measure exposure. Engagement measures response.
For marketing leaders, tracking the social media engagement rate across accounts serves four practical purposes:
In short, engagement rate is the metric that tells you whether your audience cares, not just whether they saw it.
You calculate engagement rate by dividing total engagements by an audience measure, then multiplying by 100. Which audience measure you use depends on what you’re trying to learn. There are three common methods:
Here’s how each one works. For more variations, including daily and cost-per-engagement formulas, see our full guide to measuring social engagement.
Formula: (Total engagements / Reach) x 100
This is the most accurate measure of content quality, because it only counts people who actually saw the post. Use it when you want to know how compelling a piece of content was.
Formula: (Total engagements / Followers) x 100
This is the most widely reported engagement rate formula, and the one used for the industry benchmarks below. Use it when you need to compare your performance to published averages.
Formula: (Total engagements / Impressions) x 100
Impressions count every view, including repeat views, so this number runs lower than engagement by reach. Use it for paid campaigns where frequency matters. You can find additional formula breakdowns if you need to go deeper.
Note: If you’re calculating your account’s total engagement, include information about all your posts (e.g., total number of posts published, total number of likes, total number of impressions, and so on).
If you’re calculating the engagement rate of a specific social media marketing campaign, only include the details of the social media posts that were part of the campaign.
A good engagement rate generally falls between 1% and 5%, depending on the platform and industry. Anything above 4% is strong on Instagram and LinkedIn, while 1.5% to 3% is closer to normal on TikTok and Facebook.
Here’s how the ranges break down per platform:
Platform
Low
Average
Good
Exceptional
Instagram
Under 2.5%
4.2%
5% to 7%
Above 7%
LinkedIn
Under 2%
3.9%
4.5% to 6%
Above 6%
Facebook
Under 1.5%
2.9%
3.5% to 5%
Above 5%
X (Twitter)
Under 1%
1.8%
2.5% to 4%
Above 4%
TikTok
Under 1%
1.5%
2.5% to 4%
Above 4%
This is also why a question like “is 12% engagement on Instagram good?” has an easy answer. Yes, 12% is exceptional. It’s nearly three times the 4.2% average, and usually a sign of either a highly engaged niche audience or a post that broke out well beyond your follower base.
Keep in mind that account size, content format, and industry all shift what’s realistic. Smaller accounts tend to post higher percentages simply because their audiences are more invested, so compare yourself to accounts of a similar size in your sector before deciding whether your number is a problem.
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Across all industries we measured, Instagram leads at 4.2%, with LinkedIn behind at 3.9%. TikTok sits at the bottom of the list at 1.5%.
Platform
Average engagement rate (best-performing content type)
Instagram
4.2%
LinkedIn
3.9%
Facebook
2.9%
X (Twitter)
1.8%
TikTok
1.5%
The spread is wide enough to matter for planning. A 2% engagement rate would be mediocre on Instagram and strong on TikTok, which is why platform-level context should come before any judgment about performance.
Engagement rate by industry ranges from roughly 0.7% to 5.5% depending on the sector and platform, with construction, education, and nonprofits leading overall. All figures below reflect each platform’s best-performing content type, measured per post against follower count.
Industries are ordered below from strongest to weakest overall performance, so you can see quickly where your sector sits.
This sector posts consistently strong numbers, leading on TikTok (2.6%) and reaching 5.2% on Instagram. Process footage, equipment, and finished builds give these teams naturally watchable content, which pays off most on video-first platforms.
Education performs well on every platform, with Instagram (5.4%) and Facebook (5.2%) standing out, and Facebook is the highest rate of any industry we measured. Built-in communities of students, parents, and alumni give these accounts an audience with a genuine reason to respond.
Nonprofits lead on Instagram at 5.5%, the highest rate of any sector alongside utilities and energy. Mission-driven storytelling tends to earn the kind of saves and shares that algorithms reward.
Healthcare organizations see solid results on Instagram (4.5%) and LinkedIn (3.4%), helped by high demand for clear, trustworthy health information. TikTok is the outlier at 1.0%, which likely reflects how carefully regulated medical content has to be handled.
See more healthcare-specific analytics insights.
Financial services does better than most marketers expect, with Instagram at 4.1% and LinkedIn at 3.3%. Practical money content tends to earn saves, which counts toward engagement on Instagram.
Utilities and energy records the strongest Instagram rate of any sector at 5.5%, alongside 3.4% on LinkedIn. Short video explainers and outage or service updates give these accounts a clear reason to post, and audiences a clear reason to watch.
Professional services perform best on Instagram (4.1%) and LinkedIn (4.0%), where listings, case studies, and expertise-led posts land well. TikTok lags at 0.95%, suggesting the format is still a tough fit for most firms.
Government accounts post above-average results on Instagram (5.0%), with LinkedIn at 2.8%. Service announcements and community updates drive steady, if not spectacular, interaction.
Unusually for a consumer-facing sector, LinkedIn leads here at 4.5%, ahead of Instagram at 3.7%. Hiring posts, openings, and operator-to-operator content tend to outperform the food photography on this platform.
Retail brands perform most strongly on LinkedIn (4.3%), ahead of Instagram at 3.6%. Facebook is the weak spot at 1.9%, where organic reach for retail pages is heavily limited.
Agencies do best on LinkedIn (4.7%), the highest LinkedIn rate of any industry we measured, where peer and client audiences live. TikTok is the clear weak point at 0.7%, one of the lowest rates in the dataset.
Technology posts solid results on Instagram (4.2%) and LinkedIn (3.9%), reflecting how much B2B tech conversation happens there, and it leads every sector on X at 2.5%. Facebook (1.8%) and TikTok (0.7%) are both well below average.
Media brands post below-average results on Instagram (3.2%) and Facebook (2.6%), with LinkedIn at 3.4%. High posting volume spreads engagement thinner across a large follower base.
Instagram is the best platform for engagement, consistently recording the highest average rates across industries at 4.2% overall, according to our research.
For brands and organizations just getting started with social media marketing, Instagram’s visual appeal, interactive features, and smart algorithm give engagement a natural boost, helped by the fact that half of U.S. adults now use the platform.
That said, the best platform for your brand is the one where your audience is already active. B2B teams routinely see better results on LinkedIn than Instagram, as the technology and agency numbers above show.
Nonprofits lead the pack in terms of engagement on Instagram (5.5%), tied with utilities and energy. Turns out, content with a real mission behind it tends to strike an emotional chord, which is exactly what Instagram rewards.
It’s also a reminder that production budget isn’t the deciding factor. A phone-shot Reels clip with a clear human story routinely outperforms a polished brand video.
Despite its popularity, TikTok had the lowest overall average engagement rate at 1.5%, with some industries, like marketing agencies and technology, recording rates below 1%.
The gap usually comes down to fit. TikTok’s recommendation engine pushes content to non-followers who are there to be entertained, so posts built around brand messaging get served to audiences with no reason to interact.
The consumer goods and retail sector shows consistently high engagement across most major platforms, and particularly on LinkedIn at 4.3%. Informative, discussion-driven posts about products, supply chains, and hiring appear to do the heavy lifting.
At 3.9% overall, LinkedIn sits within half a percentage point of Instagram, with engagement up 8% year-over-year. That surprises a lot of marketers who still treat it as a secondary channel.
For B2B brands, the implication is straightforward. If your audience is professional and your content is substantive, LinkedIn can deliver Instagram-level engagement without competing against entertainment content for attention.
Facebook’s 2.9% overall average hides a wide spread: education leads at 5.2%, while technology trails at 1.8%.
Organic reach for brand pages has been squeezed for years in favor of paid distribution, which caps how many followers ever see a post. If Facebook matters to your business, treat it as a paid and community channel rather than an organic reach play, and judge it against Facebook benchmarks rather than Instagram ones.
Improving your engagement rate comes down to producing fewer, better posts for a clearly defined audience, then letting the data decide what you make next. Five approaches do most of the work:
Done consistently, these shifts matter more than any single content trend, because they compound across every post you publish.
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Karolina Mikolajczyk is a Team Lead on Hootsuite’s Inbound team and an associate editor of the Hootsuite blog.
After completing her Master’s degree in English, Karolina launched her marketing career in 2014. Before joining Hootsuite in 2021, she worked with digital marketing agencies, SaaS startups, and international enterprise businesses, helping brands and social media content creators grow their online presence and improve conversions through SEO and content marketing strategies.
Karolina lives in Vancouver, BC. She likes to spend her free time bike touring wine bars and hanging out with her two cats, Juju and Tuna.
Create. Schedule. Publish. Engage. Measure. Win.
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