As part of its Q3 2026 earnings report, Meta also shared some additional notes on the relative growth of Facebook, Instagram and Threads, including insights into some of the key elements of interest in each app.
These points also underline what Meta wants to emphasize on each platform, which could inform strategic planning for marketers looking to align with the company’s growth focus.
First, on Instagram. Meta reported that global time spent per Instagram user reached an all-time high in Q3, on the back of strong growth across both Reels and Feed.
As per Meta CFO Susan Li: “On Instagram Reels, our relevance launches in Q3 increased Reels time spent by over 4%, driven in part by our upgraded model architecture that ranks sequences of Reels at a time, instead of evaluating each Reel independently, as well as improvements we made to add richer watch time signals.”
Li added that almost 45% of recommended Instagram Reels are now less than one day old, which is an increase of more than 11 percentage points from Q2.
Instagram has made original content a bigger focus this year, with the platform launching a significant update in April that aimed to remove aggregators and copycats from its recommendations.
The fact that more fresh content is being recommended could be another reflection of this focus, ensuring that new content is reaching more people. This has also clearly had an impact on audience interest.
It’s also important for creators to note that the vast majority of Reels engagement is increasingly likely to happen on the first day.
Instagram also recently shared updated guidance on what it considers to be unoriginal content for reference.
On Facebook, Reels was also a key driver of engagement, with Reels time spent reaching an all-time high in the app in Q3, and growing double-digits year over year.
Li said that improvements to its recommendation systems and ranking have helped to drive more usage in the app.
“On Facebook Feed and Reels, we completed the global launch of a new generative retrieval architecture which, inspired by LLMs, labels pieces of content with semantic representations and generates potential recommendations, helping our systems surface relevant new posts before they’ve accumulated significant engagement,” Li said. “This new architecture is now rolled out to roughly one-quarter of unconnected Feed views and half of Reels views and increased Reels watch time by 1%.”
Li added that improved recommendations are also delivering fresher and more personalized content.
“On Facebook Reels, we doubled the amount of history our ranking model can consider, driving a 1% increase in Reels watch time in the US,” Li said.
This is a key development because for some time, Facebook user engagement was in decline. Users were still logging in every day to check on the latest updates from friends and family, which kept its total active user count high. But TikTok clearly had an impact on Facebook retention, with people checking into Facebook, then drifting over to TikTok and other platforms, where they now spend more time.
The introduction of Reels, and Reels recommendations specifically, has helped to rejuvenate Facebook, with more people spending time on the main Meta platform again.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that Threads has now overtaken X in monthly active users, and continues to grow quickly.
Li said that time spent per user on Threads grew by more than 20% year over year, driven by ongoing network growth and systematic improvements related to relevance, personalization and timeliness of the content recommended.
Threads has become a serious player in the broader social media market, with more than 500 million monthly active users. The continued improvement in audience engagement points to expanded opportunity for marketers, and could also drive more revenue opportunities for the company’s ad business.
Finally, Li said that Meta’s Creator Marketing Hub, which is now available to all advertisers, includes more than 10 million creators that brands can partner with on campaigns.
“We are integrating Meta AI Business Assistant into the Hub so advertisers can conversationally search for creators, identify content to use in partnership ads and get guidance across their creator marketing workflows,” Li said.
