Random Labs: What Is a Good Click-Through Rate on Social Media in 2026?

As we approach the end of 2025, marking another typically turbulent year for social media, it is a great time to examine click-through rates across various platforms. So, what is a reasonable click-through rate on social media in 2026?

What is click-through rate?

Click-through rate (CTR%) is primarily a key metric used in the context of paid digital marketing. This metric measures the ratio of users to the number of times a specific content was viewed, expressed in percentage format. Given the wide variations in factors such as ad budget, targeting, objectives, and more, CTR% serves as a standardized metric to analyze how effectively a paid strategy has been implemented.

What are the click-through rate benchmarks on social media?

The following table presents recent data on click-through rates across various social channels:

PlatformClickthrough Rate%Source
Facebook0.90%-1.10%Superads
Instagram0.58%-1.58%Marketing LTB
LinkedIn0.40%-0.60%AdBacklog
TikTok0.56%-0.70%AdBacklog
YouTube~0.65%AWISEE

When evaluating clickthrough rates on a broad scale, it is best to consider them as a range when benchmarking, since countless variations impact this metric. A larger range, like we see with the percentages for Instagram, can indicate relatively higher overall variation, which makes sense for a platform like Instagram that flexes with so many different content types.

What factors contribute to click-through rate?

The following lists some of the major factors that can contribute to click-through rates for any ad:

Although a broad, platform-wide range is a good starting point for comparing your CTR% performance across different social platforms, we can narrow down comparisons further with additional context such as ad objectives, industry, or audience size. 

Narrowing down benchmarks to your specific niche and campaign goals enables more meaningful comparisons and realistic performance expectations. Ultimately, the best benchmark is one that reflects the unique dynamics of your audience, ad creatives, and conversion goals, guiding you to optimize for both higher CTR and better overall returns.

What is a good CTR percentage? This depends on your business or objective.

Personalizing benchmarks that best suit your needs is definitely more involved, but that’s where we can help!

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Random Labs: Does Posting on Holidays Decrease Performance?

As we enter the peak holiday season, we thought it would be a great time to share our latest Random Labs experiment, which explores one of the most common marketing dilemmas: Does posting on holidays decrease performance?

Specifically, we are analyzing whether posting content during these holidays impacts both content and channel metrics to identify any cause and effect from a holistic perspective. We will analyze our content across Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn to determine any significant impact of holiday posts on performance and growth. 

The Data

Looking back at the 2024-2025 content, we decided to include eight holidays in our analysis, selecting four federal holidays and four observances to provide a broader range.

HolidayMonthType
Christmas (Winter Greetings)DecemberFederal
HalloweenOctoberFederal
ThanksgivingNovemberFederal
New YearsJanuaryFederal
Earth DayAprilObservance
International Women's DayMarchObservance
World Kindness DayNovemberObservance
Mental Health AwarenessMayObservance

Having pinpointed these eight holidays throughout the year, we will evaluate content performance and potential channel-wide effects across three platforms. This will enhance our multivariate analysis by revealing whether certain platforms have a higher affinity for specific holidays (or holiday content in general). 

The Analysis

The following percentage heat map was created to evaluate content from various holidays and observances against overall monthly post performance:

Although the output contains substantial numerical data, the interpretation is straightforward. The percentages indicate performance differences between posts related to specific holidays or observances and the monthly content average for their respective months. For instance, our Facebook post achieved 447% higher engagement and 36% higher views than the content average for December, the month in which that post appeared. Vice versa, negative percentages indicate that the holiday or observance content scored lower than the average monthly posts for each metric and platform. 

The Conclusion

When evaluating our output, the results were extremely typical of what we see daily, even for non-holiday posts: a lot of variation. For instance, we observed a slightly higher positive lift in count across Meta channels compared to LinkedIn. However, some of LinkedIn's extremely high lifts (over 100%) resulted from individual holiday posts significantly outperforming that month’s overall content. The spread of positive and negative percentage lifts likely indicates that there isn’t enough evidence to suggest that the holidays themselves are the determining factor behind content performance - especially when we start looking at the type of content itself.

So does posting on holidays decrease performance? Not inherently. 

As mentioned before, in some months, especially around New Year’s, we saw one of our relatively higher-performing pieces of content, while in other months, we fell short in comparison to other non-holiday content. The performance of holiday content is likely dictated by the same factors as any other content—primarily content relevance, content type, audience activity levels, individual platform algorithms, and other contextual variables. 

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Here Are the 2025 Social Media Benchmarks for Financial Brands

We’re heading into crunch time for 2025, and thought it would be an excellent opportunity to identify key social media benchmarks for the financial industry. 

Why Engagement Rates Matter for Financial Services

Engagement rates remain a popular choice of KPI as they directly reflect how effectively financial brands are connecting with their audiences through content. We will look at these specific percentages for this industry across five of the more mainstream platforms: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, and LinkedIn. 

2025 Engagement Rates by Platform (Financial Services)

We will draw from Hootsuite’s report, which covers average engagement rates across various industries in a study conducted this year. 

Engagement Rates (Per Post)

PlatformEngagement Rate (Industry: Financial Services)
Facebook1.8%
Instagram3.8%
LinkedIn3.2%
X2.1%
TikTok1.6%

How Engagement Rates Are Calculated (Hootsuite Formula)

As discussed in previous blogs, when comparing to benchmarks or studies, it is essential to ensure that our KPI (engagement rate) is calculated similarly to the metrics we are referencing. Since engagement rates can vary depending on the variables and platforms used, we will use the following formula from Hootsuite as the basis for these benchmarks:

In the context of the Hootsuite report, engagement also includes the number of clicks and DMs, which may not always be conventionally included in other variations of this formula. Additionally, the number of posts is subjective to the chosen time period. For example, you may count posts from a given month or year. We recommend using monthly durations to better account for significant platform changes or updated studies. If the post volume for any given month is small, consider a duration that covers at least 30 posts. 

Platform Insights: Winners and Laggards

Based on the overall report, financial services show strong engagement performance compared to other industries on:

Meanwhile, engagement is lower (<2%) on:

What These 2025 Benchmarks Mean for Financial Marketers

Key Takeaway for Financial Services Brands

Financial institutions should:

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Which Social Media Platform Has the Best ROI for Brands in 2025?

We examined which social media platforms have delivered the best return on investment (ROI)—a key performance indicator that our clients understandably value.

What is return on investment (ROI)?

Return on investment (ROI) is a key performance indicator (KPI) used to evaluate the profitability of an investment.

Assessing this KPI in the context of social media is more nuanced than in conventional businesses, since not everything on these platforms can be quantified in monetary terms.

As expected from much of our cross-platform research, our results show that each platform demonstrates varying levels of success in this category, depending on business objectives. We will dive into different platforms in this study: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, and YouTube. 

The following evaluates the benefits of each platform from a marketing perspective.

What is the ROI for Facebook?

Facebook

What is the ROI for Instagram?

Instagram

What is the ROI for LinkedIn?

LinkedIn

What is the ROI for TikTok?

TikTok

What is the ROI for YouTube?

YouTube 

Which social media platform has the best ROI?

In conclusion, we can provide a general overview of the benefits of investing resources in each platform:

FacebookFacebook remains a strong platform for video-driven marketing and B2B strategies, but success increasingly depends on well-planned paid campaigns due to reduced organic visibility.
InstagramInvesting in Instagram is highly effective for driving engagement and leads, especially through video content that resonates well with audiences.
LinkedInLinkedIn is a trusted platform for B2B marketing investments, offering valuable opportunities to drive high-quality conversions.
TikTokTikTok stands out for delivering quick returns and strong audience engagement, making it a smart choice for brands targeting younger demographics.
YouTubeYouTube is a versatile platform that supports brand awareness and direct conversions, making it worthwhile for comprehensive marketing strategies across the customer journey.

Like most questions that compare different platforms, especially when it comes to ROI, there isn’t a single platform that offers the best of all worlds. The most effective choice for investing in advertising depends heavily on your specific business goals, target audience, and overall marketing strategy. Different platforms excel in different areas—some may be better for driving brand awareness, while others focus more on direct conversions or engagement with niche communities.

Ultimately, the key to maximizing ROI is tailoring your platform investments to align with your business objectives and understanding where your audience spends their time. A well-rounded advertising strategy often involves leveraging multiple platforms in ways that complement each other, rather than relying solely on one. This approach ensures that your marketing efforts are both efficient and effective in meeting your unique goals.

Want personalized help with marketing strategies to optimize your social media results? Chat with our team today! 

Here are the 2025 LinkedIn Benchmarks

LinkedIn has transformed in 2025, introducing a more intelligent algorithm that rewards meaningful interactions, expanding its capabilities for video content, and rolling out innovative features for personal and company branding. These strategic shifts have redefined how professionals connect and businesses promote their brands on the platform. In this blog, we’ll dive into the 2025 LinkedIn engagement benchmarks—drawing on trusted insights from Hootsuite—and explore what these numbers mean for your strategy in the year ahead.

What Is Social Media Benchmarking?

Benchmarking is key to the analytics process. It allows you to compare your social media results against specific thresholds or standards. This enables you to set realistic objectives, optimize strategy, and identify what's best for your business. 

In our LinkedIn benchmarking analysis, Hootsuite utilizes a follower-based engagement rate. This particular form of engagement rate is a solid KPI for assessing users' activity levels within your existing community. 

This can be calculated manually using this formula:

Understanding how each metric is defined is key when comparing your results to studies, as formulas can vary between sources. 

What Are the 2025 LinkedIn Benchmarks?

After reviewing Hootsuite’s latest study on LinkedIn engagement rates, we can summarize the following percentages across various industries:

Agencies: 3.7%

Education: 2.8%

Media and Entertainment: 2.0%

Financial Services: 3.2%

Dining, Hospitality, and Tourism: 3.9%

Government: 2.7%

Healthcare, Pharma, and Biotech: 3.3%

Real Estate, Legal, and Other Professional: 3.2%

Consumer Goods and Retail: 3.9%

Construction, Mining, and Manufacturing: 4.0%

Technology: 3.6%

Utilities and Energy: 3.3%

NonProfit: 3.0%

Other: 3.8%

What are the Key Insights from the 2025 LinkedIn Benchmarks?

According to Hootsuite, the Consumer Goods and Retail industry consistently maintained higher engagement rates across multiple social platforms—an important trend when analyzing social performance at the industry level. 

Content in this industry could be leading the way in:

When comparing how much one industry outperforms another on a specific platform like LinkedIn, it's essential to consider potential variances caused by external factors that may not be accounted for. As noted in the formulaic breakdown of the average engagement rate above, the number of posts and follower count heavily influence the final percentage, both of which can vary significantly between profiles.

It’s extremely important to use these 2025 LinkedIn benchmarks as a surface-level comparison, and to build on them with personalized benchmarking that aligns with your specific strategy.

Want personalized help with benchmarking strategies to optimize your social media results? Chat with our team today!

Random Labs: Are Instagram Reels or Carousels Better for Reach?

Collage Style Image with Instagram logo

As we reach the midpoint of 2025, Instagram remains a leading platform in social media marketing, particularly for experimenting with high-performing content formats. This makes it an ideal time to explore two of the most effective content types based on recent performance trends: Reels and carousels. Are Reels or carousels better for reach?

Once again, we’re using our own Instagram data to inform these comparisons, specifically content from this year to date, during which we posted a high volume of carousels and Reels.

For more insights like these, feel free to follow us on Instagram!

Data Analysis:

We analyzed over 25 posts for each content type, covering approximately six months of Instagram activity. Our working hypothesis for our 2025 Instagram strategy is that Reels tend to reach significantly more users, while carousels consistently emerge as the top-performing format for driving engagement.

We’ve also observed that this performance gap between the two content types has become increasingly pronounced in recent years.

The table below compares these formats across key Instagram metrics by averages, all of which can be accessed directly from Meta Business Suite. (Check out our blog on benchmarking to learn how to pull and interpret this data.)

Additionally, if a significant difference was observed for any given metric, the corresponding cell is highlighted in green in varying shades based on that level of significance.

Data Table

Having run some basic hypothesis tests comparing two samples, we can draw the following conclusions and interpretations for each metric.

Reach

Reach, alongside Engagement Rate, was the most significantly different metric among those analyzed. In addition to Reels generating higher average reach across the sample, we also observed a greater number of outliers, unlike carousels, which featured none. The data provides strong evidence—both in this analysis and from previous years—that Reels consistently offer greater audience reach potential.

Engagement

When it comes to total engagement and likes, carousels continue to lead the platform. However, the gap between carousels and Reels is narrowing in newer data—Reels are even outperforming in certain areas, such as shares and saves. Beyond the ongoing platform shift toward prioritizing video content, the recent introduction of collaboration features is likely further amplifying engagement totals for Reels. Furthermore, because Reels are outpacing all other content types in terms of reach, we expect engagement rates to be lower—though relative engagement can still be higher.

Should I Post Carousels or Reels?

So what content type should you prioritize? 

Based on our analysis, Reels generate significantly higher reach than other content types. This is likely driven by the platform’s structure and the overwhelming popularity of vertical video content today.

Whether to use Reels over carousels depends on your specific strategy. We always prioritize testing different content types across various components and would never recommend narrowing your approach to a single format—social media platforms evolve faster than benchmarking reports can keep up.

Want personalized help with benchmarking strategies to optimize your social media results? Chat with our team today!

Here Are the 2025 Instagram Benchmarks by Industry

A lot has changed for Instagram over the past few years, but the platform remains one of the top powerhouses among social media platforms in 2025. We thought this would be the perfect opportunity to evaluate the 2025 Instagram benchmarks—our very first iteration on this platform.

Once again, Rival IQ released its yearly study of key social media benchmarks for 2025, including Instagram. In this post, we will:  

What is Social Media Benchmarking?

Benchmarking is a key part of the analytics process, allowing you to compare your social media results against specific thresholds or standards. This enables you to set realistic objectives, optimize strategy, and identify what's best for your business.

The Rival IQ report focuses on metrics relative to industry benchmarks. However, you can also create your own benchmarks for a more tailored understanding of your marketing performance. Learn more from our experts about personalized benchmarking! 

Also, feel free to check out the TikTok benchmarks if you're extra curious!

What are the 2025 Instagram Benchmarks?

Similar to most benchmarking studies, we examine engagement rates. Below are the corresponding rates across different industries:

Alcohol: 0.37%

Fashion: 0.15%

Financial Services: 0.26%

Food & Beverage: 0.40%

Health & Beauty: 0.14%

Higher Ed: 2.10%

Home Decor: 0.14%

Influencers: 0.58%

Media: 0.44%

Nonprofits: 0.56%

Retail: 0.16%

Sports Teams: 1.30%

Tech & Software: 0.33%

Travel: 0.34%

The overall median across all industries is marked at 0.36% for 2025. 

There are two primary ways to calculate engagement rates on Instagram, which are often the two formats you'll commonly see. The list above uses Average Engagement Rate Per Post (by follower), which is likely calculated by taking the total engagement on your content, dividing it by the number of posts, and then dividing that result by the number of followers.

You can also calculate Average Engagement Rate Per Post (by reach), which we often like to do. This is calculated using post reach instead of followers, and aligns more closely with Meta’s native way of calculating engagement rates on the backend and better accounts for engagement from both non-followers and followers.

What do the 2025 Instagram benchmarks reveal?

According to Rival IQ, engagement rates across all the listed industries declined compared to the previous year. However, this doesn't necessarily mean that total engagements on the platform are down, as a decrease in engagement rate can also result from an increase in audience size — a simple example of the denominator effect.

We do have a one-word answer when it comes to content type: reels. While Reels generate strong engagement, their reach—particularly among non-followers—far exceeds their engagement levels, making them a powerful tool for visibility and discovery rather than pure interaction. In our observations, we notice frequent discrepancies in the number of users who get shown reels compared to other content types on Instagram. In 2025, the platform continued refining its focus on video content.

We can also notice that Higher Ed and Sports Teams are the only industries marked by Rival IQ to exceed a full percentage point in engagement rate. For sports teams, fan loyalty and passion drive high interaction—supporters celebrate wins, rally through losses, and share memorable moments, creating a vibrant and engaged fan base. Similarly, higher education institutions foster pride and belonging among students, alumni, and staff. The “alma mater” connection encourages users to engage with content that reflects shared experiences, milestones, and traditions, making these communities highly active and engaged on social media. There is some integration of one of these industries towards the other. 

To conclude, looking beyond these average metrics across industries is essential. As mentioned, this includes factors such as content type, tendencies on the platform, varying audience sizes, posting cadence, and much more.

Want personalized help with benchmarking strategies to optimize your social media results? Chat with our team today! 

Here Are the 2025 TikTok Benchmarks

It’s no secret that TikTok has been at the center of a political storm in 2025, facing waves of government bans and mounting pressure like never before. Regardless, we are here to help weather the storm and provide you with some benchmarks for the new year. 

Once again, Rival IQ released its yearly iteration of key social media benchmarks for 2025, including TikTok. In this post, we will: 

What is Social Media Benchmarking?

Benchmarking is a key part of the analytics process, allowing you to compare your social media results against specific thresholds or standards. This allows you to set realistic objectives, optimize strategy, and identify what's best for your business.

The Rival IQ report focuses on metrics relative to industry benchmarks. However, you can also create your own benchmarks for a more tailored understanding of your marketing performance. Learn more from our experts about personalized benchmarking! 

What are the 2025 TikTok Benchmarks?

Much like last year’s benchmarks, we have a new set of engagement rates across various industries for TikTok. 

Alcohol: 1.76%

Fashion: 0.95%

Financial Services: 1.33%

Food & Beverage: 2.04%

Health & Beauty: 0.85%

Higher Ed: 7.36%

Home Decor: 1.52%

Influencers: 1.11%

Media: 1.34%

Nonprofits: 3.04%

Retail: 1.28%

Sports Teams: 2.68%

Tech & Software: 1.21%

Travel: 2.73%

The overall median across all industries is marked at 1.73% for 2025. 

As another refresher, these figures represent the engagement rate per video relative to followers. You can calculate this for your account by summing all engagements (likes, comments, shares, etc.), dividing that by the total number of videos, then dividing the result by your total number of followers, and finally multiplying by 100 to express it as a percentage. You can use the following expression to get the engagement rate by followers for any platform:

What Do the 2025 TikTok Benchmarks Mean?

According to Rival IQ’s report, TikTok’s overall engagement rate has declined compared to the previous year. When considering this form of engagement rate, which accounts for both posting cadence and follower count, these changes can be directly influenced by shifts in either volume. It's much more challenging to maintain high engagement rates with an increase in cadence or a significantly larger audience pool. General platform turbulence may have also played a role, especially with all the shutdown news during this reporting year.

As an additional reminder, engagement rate medians and averages can be somewhat volatile in comparison contexts due to factors mentioned above—such as differences in posting activity and audience size across accounts. It’s best to approach industry comparisons from a broader, high-level perspective and consider additional benchmarking that incorporates your own data.

Want personalized help with benchmarking strategies to optimize your social media results? Chat with our team today!