This is the most-asked comparison in the category and the one with the least evidence behind it. That is worth saying plainly, because the confident answers circulating are not based on anything.
What is the honest answer?
There is no published figure for the share of a Facebook Group's members who ever post. Meta does not release it. The academic literature on lurking puts the range anywhere from 0% to 99% depending on the type of community, which is too wide to anchor a comparison to anything.
So the honest answer is: unknown, and unknowable from outside.
That is not a dodge. It is the reportable finding. When a measurement does not exist, saying so is more useful than producing a number that looks like one — and it is precisely why measuring the Skool side was worth doing. Until now there has been nothing solid to hold a community up against in either direction.
If you see a specific Facebook Groups participation figure quoted, it was not published by Meta. It was either extrapolated from a single group somebody had admin access to, borrowed from unrelated research, or invented. All three happen constantly in this category.
What can actually be measured?
The Skool side, exactly — because public post histories can be read in full rather than sampled.
Across 688 public Skool communities with a complete crawl, a median 7.3% of members have ever written a post. Counting comments as well, participation runs about 27.8% in communities where full data is available — and 21.3% of members comment without ever posting, which is participation no outside count of a Facebook Group could see either.
That last figure is the reason this comparison is harder than it looks. Even with perfect access to both platforms, "engagement" means at least three different things, and the answer changes depending on which you pick.
Is there any benchmark that does exist?
One, and it is not platform-specific: the 90-9-1 rule from Nielsen Norman Group. In online communities generally, roughly 1% create, 9% respond, and 90% read without contributing. It has held its shape across two decades and a great many different platforms.
Against that, the median Skool community's 7.3% creator rate sits on the generous side. The mismatch runs in Skool's favour and should be stated: 90-9-1 is usually measured over a window, while creator rate is all-time, which is the more forgiving denominator because anyone who ever posted counts forever.
Read that as evidence that Skool communities are not unusually quiet places. Do not read it as a precise multiple, and do not let it stand in for the Facebook comparison — a general rule about online communities is not a measurement of a specific competitor.
So why do people believe Skool wins?
Because there are adjacent comparisons that can be made, and they do favour Skool — they just are not this one.
Against Instagram and Facebook Pages, where published benchmarks do exist, the gap is large and measurable: a median Skool post reaches 5.1% of members against 0.3% of followers for a median Instagram brand post. Skool vs Instagram has that arithmetic in full.
But Pages are not Groups. A Facebook Page broadcasts to followers through a ranking algorithm designed to suppress unpaid reach. A Facebook Group is a community space that works much more like Skool does. Substituting the Page figure for the Group figure is the single most common sleight of hand in this category, and it is usually accidental.
What the absence does and does not mean. It does not mean Skool loses. It means the comparison has never been made with evidence on both sides, so nobody — including us — is in a position to claim it either way.
What should you compare instead?
Three comparisons that are actually available to you.
Your community against communities your size. Contribution rates shift by band, so this is the only external comparison that carries information. What is a good Skool engagement rate has the bands.
Your community against itself, a month ago. The only comparison you fully control and the only one that tells you whether what you are doing is working.
Your Group against your Skool room, if you run both. You have admin access to both sides, which makes you one of the very few people who could answer the original question for your own audience. Count distinct posters against member count in each, over the same window, and you have a real answer for your case — which is worth more to you than a platform-wide figure would be anyway.
These figures come from The State of Skool 2026, an independent measurement of 18,412 Skool communities. See the full report for the full benchmark analysis and 21 other findings.