Social Media Analysis · Instagram & Facebook Jan 2023–Jun 2026 · LinkedIn Jun 2025–Jun 2026
Reach has declined every year since 2024 — from an average of 189 per post down to 146 in 2026. The format that reverses this (Reels) averaged 244 reach per post this year and is getting better over time. In 2026, only 1 in 5 posts was a Reel. For the three years before that, it was closer to 1 in 3.
What's happening: The best format is being used least. Reach is following it down.
Reaches more people per post than Instagram — 277 average vs 177 — and has for two years running. The posts that drive that performance aren't product photography. Six of the top seven Facebook posts from 2024–2026 feature real people: a tribute, team spotlights, milestone moments. Product posts perform below average.
What's happening: People content is outperforming product content. The calendar doesn't reflect that yet.
Different audience than the other two — clients, partners, and potential referral sources who are actively researching THS. Images outperform video here. Named team spotlights are the strongest consistent performer. The Women of Gold series ran in March 2026 and averaged 440 impressions per post — the highest of any content type in the dataset.
What's happening: The best-performing format runs once a year. Everything else averages 294 impressions.
Reels average 2.5 shares. Images average 0.8. That gap is why format mix matters — it's not the format itself, it's what the format makes people do.
Saves have almost no correlation with reach.
Only 4 of 112 Facebook posts hit 6+ shares. Three are people-focused. The chain: people content → shares → exponential reach amplification.
Unlike Instagram, Facebook rewards every type of engagement roughly equally.
The 17.7% native ER looks strong. The real social signal — reactions, comments, reposts — is 2.7%. LinkedIn's metric and Instagram's metric are not the same thing.
Team members posting from personal profiles will structurally outperform the company page on the same content. This isn't a content fix — it's an activation question.
Posting more than 4 times a month on Facebook reduces per-post reach — posts start competing with each other for the same audience. The algorithm gives each post more visibility when it's not fighting recent posts from the same page.
Posts spaced 8–14 days apart outperform posts 1–3 days apart. Combined with the 3–4 posts/month sweet spot, the target cadence is roughly one post per week to every 10 days — not more.
The feed is already 69% personality content. The problem isn't what's being posted — it's the format. Reels are the only format that reaches people outside the existing follower base at scale, and they dropped from 37% of posts to 18% in 2026. The data below shows what that shift cost in reach, and what it would take to reverse it.
Reels earn 10% of interactions through shares. Carousels and Images earn 5%. Shares put content in front of people who don't follow THS yet.
This isn't about posting more team photos instead of client work. It's about understanding what triggers engagement on this specific platform.
Polished business content gets seen. People scroll past it because it doesn't invite a reaction. A set showcase doesn't ask anything of the viewer. Personality content does. A photo of three interns, a Halloween costume contest, a team spotlight. These give people something to feel, and that feeling becomes a comment, a save, a share.
Instagram's algorithm treats those behaviors as signals of content quality. More signals equals more distribution. More distribution equals more reach. The entire chain starts with whether the post gives someone a reason to do something other than double-tap and move on.
The feed is already 69% personality content. The data isn't an argument to shift the mix. It's an argument to put more of that personality content into Reel format, because Reels generate 2x the shares of any other format and 40% more reach per post.
One specific example: the Summer Spotlight series in August 2025 — three consecutive posts featuring named team members — averaged 242 reach per post, 34% above the 2025 platform average of 181. Named people content consistently outperforms the platform average on Instagram, not just on Facebook.
Surprise: Business Images outperform Personality Images on ER%. Brand statements work better as stills than as video.
| Post | Format | Reach | ER% |
|---|---|---|---|
| Material curation reel | Reel | 1,010 | 2.5% |
| Simply Southern shoot | Image | 762 | 3.5% |
| Halloween costumes Pt.2 P | Carousel | 678 | 5.0% |
| Team personality trend reel P | Reel | 653 | 7.2% |
| David Faircloth tribute P | Image | 521 | 11.3% |
| Content drives sales BTS P | Reel | 444 | 13.3% |
| Production BTS reel P | Reel | 335 | 10.7% |
For three straight years — 2023, 2024, 2025 — Reels made up 35–38% of Instagram posts. In 2026 that dropped to 18%. No decision was made to reduce Reels. The mix drifted, Carousels and Images filled the gap, and reach followed the format down.
The compounding effect: each Reel generates an average of 2.5 shares vs 1.1 for Carousels and 0.8 for Images. Shares are how content reaches people outside the existing follower base. Lower Reel volume means fewer shares, which means slower organic audience growth — not dramatically in any single week, but consistently over time.
Reels are getting longer and reaching more people year over year. The drop in Reel volume in 2026 is not explained by declining Reel performance. The opposite is true.
Note: the 60s+ bucket has only 3 posts. Not enough to draw a firm conclusion. The 15–30s window has the strongest reach signal across a meaningful sample size (13 posts).
Overall Instagram reach has declined each year. The 2026 drop coincides with the Reel mix falling to 18%, including zero Reels in February and March. Whether these are causally linked is a question the data raises but doesn't definitively answer.
Saves have almost no correlation with reach. Despite being widely cited as Instagram's most important signal, saves barely register in this dataset. Shares and likes are the stronger predictors.
Getting to 1–2 shares adds 64% more reach vs no shares. Reels average 2.5 shares per post. Images average 0.8. This is the mechanism behind Reels' reach advantage — not format preference, but share behavior.
Facebook reaches 30.4% of its audience per post. Instagram reaches 22.5%. That gap held for two consecutive years — but it didn't exist in 2024, when Instagram led. What opened it was people-focused content: named spotlights, milestones, team moments. Six of the top seven Facebook posts in this dataset are people, not product. The data tables below show exactly where the reach is coming from and what's driving it.
| Year | FB Avg Reach | FB Reach Rate | IG Avg Reach | IG Reach Rate | Leader |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 161 | 17.7% | 189 | 24.0% | |
| 2025 | 345 | 37.9% | 181 | 23.0% | |
| 2026 (Jan–Jun) | 294 | 32.3% | 146 | 18.6% | |
| Overall | 277 | 30.4% | 177 | 22.5% |
Reach rate = avg reach per post ÷ current follower count. Follower counts are current (June 2026) — historical follower counts are not available, so rates are directional, not exact. Instagram: 786 followers. Facebook: 910 followers.
Photos earn more than 2× the engagement rate of Videos on Facebook. Videos reach more people. The two formats optimize for different outcomes on this platform.
The 2025 spike to 345 avg reach was driven by Q1 people-focused content. Q1 included a one-time tribute post that isn't repeatable, and the Women of Gold series which is. The Women of Gold format averaged 693 reach — 150% above the 2024–2026 average — and ran again in 2026 with similar results (434 avg reach).
| Post | Year | Format | Reach | ER% | Shares |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| David Faircloth tribute P | 2025 | Photo | 1,959 | 14.7% | 6 |
| Content drives sales BTS | 2026 | Video | 1,470 | 7.3% | 14 |
| THS 40th Anniversary Biz | 2024 | Video | 1,225 | 30.9% | 7 |
| Women of Gold, Lisa Schultz P | 2025 | Photo | 892 | 22.3% | 3 |
| Women of Gold, series wrap P | 2025 | Photo | 855 | 33.8% | 3 |
| Women of Gold spotlight P | 2025 | Photo | 813 | 21.2% | 2 |
| Women's History Month P | 2025 | Photo | 720 | 16.8% | 3 |
Compare to Instagram: saves have a 0.08 correlation there. On Facebook, the weakest signal (clicks at 0.66) is still stronger than Instagram's strongest non-views signal. Facebook's algorithm is more broadly responsive.
Posts with 6+ shares average 8.6× the reach of posts with no shares. People-focused content earns more shares. That's not a coincidence — it's the chain: people content → shares → exponential reach amplification.
People who find THS on LinkedIn are evaluating whether THS is worth calling — checking credentials, seeing the work, deciding if there's a point of view worth paying attention to. That changes what "good content" means here. Images and text-heavy posts outperform video (19.3% vs 8.5% native ER). LinkedIn's audience is reading, not watching. The posts that land give them something substantive to engage with.
LinkedIn rebuilt its algorithm to favor people over brands. The reasoning: people trust people more than company accounts, and LinkedIn's engagement data proved it. The result is structural — no amount of content optimization on the company page fully closes the gap.
The THS LinkedIn audience is clients, prospects, and industry contacts — exactly the people you'd want a team member talking to directly. A post from "Alex Tauras, Marketing Specialist at THS Creative" about a client project or a behind-the-scenes insight hits differently than the same post from "THS Creative." It has a face, a point of view, and a network behind it. The person reading it knows who wrote it, what their role is, and can immediately connect it to a real professional relationship.
When a THS team member shares a company post with a single sentence of personal commentary — or posts about a project, a client win, or a behind-the-scenes moment from their own profile — LinkedIn treats it as a personal recommendation and distributes it accordingly. The audience isn't just the team member's direct connections. It extends into their network's network in a way company page posts structurally cannot.
This isn't a content strategy change. It's an activation question: are team members willing to post, and is there a light enough structure to make it easy for them to do it consistently?
| Post | Imps | ER% |
|---|---|---|
| Content drives sales – BTS Biz | 720 | 17.2% |
| Women of Gold – Aubrey Butler P | 516 | 13.0% |
| ASID Carolinas Career Day Biz | 499 | 4.0% |
| Women of Gold – Lily Fraga P | 469 | 10.2% |
| Halloween costumes reveal P | 445 | 39.1% |
| Women of Gold – Laura Brooks P | 444 | 14.0% |
| Rooted Magnolia branding Biz | 446 | 57.8% |
| Halloween throwback P | 386 | 50.5% |
In April 2026, one piece of content — the "Content That Drives Sales" BTS video — ran on all three platforms in the same week. Instagram: 444 reach. LinkedIn: 720 impressions. Facebook: 1,470 reach. Same content, same week. Each platform did exactly what it was built to do: Facebook amplified shares, LinkedIn drove professional click-throughs, Instagram earned the strongest engagement rate. The gap between platforms isn't a failure — it's an argument for posting strong content on all three.
In March 2026, Women of Gold ran on all three platforms simultaneously — four posts each. Facebook averaged 434 reach per post. LinkedIn averaged 440 impressions. Instagram averaged 171 reach. Facebook and LinkedIn reached roughly the same number of people; Instagram reached less than half.
The caveat: LinkedIn impressions and Facebook/Instagram reach aren't the same metric. LinkedIn can count the same person more than once. But even directionally, the pattern is clear — named people content travels further on Facebook and LinkedIn than on Instagram, and the engagement rate on all three platforms was within 4 points of each other (13.9% / 13.9% / 9.5%).
Instagram Reels held at 35–38% for three years before dropping to 18% in 2026. Facebook Video (Reels + Videos combined) dropped earlier — from 36% in 2023 to 21% in 2024 — partially recovered to 27% in 2025, then fell to 19% in 2026.
Both platforms landed at essentially the same number in 2026: 18–19% video content. The paths were different — Facebook dropped first, Instagram dropped later — but the endpoint is the same. That convergence at the same level in the same year points to an organizational output constraint, not a platform-specific algorithm change.
FB "Video" includes both Reels and Videos post types. IG tracks Reels only.