Meta Might Start Charging Businesses to Post Links on Facebook

The humble hyperlink is the lifeblood of the world wide web. Indeed, the fundamental nature of the web is that of an intricately woven system of links that’s constantly expanding as more webpages are created — and people share links to all of those webpages with their friends, families, co-workers, and customers.

One of the chief ways of sharing links is via social media platforms like Facebook, X, and Bluesky. Unfortunately, many of those platforms limit the effectiveness of sharing links by throttling and deprioritizing link posts in their users’ timelines. (Notably, Bluesky does not throttle links.) The reason for this is simple: The more time people spend on social media platforms, the more ads they see, and the more money those platforms make. Link posts, however, encourage people to leave social media platforms and visit other websites, which directly threatens the platforms’ ad revenue.

And now Meta, which owns Facebook, is going one step further. As reported by Andrew Hutchinson, Meta is testing a new policy of charging business pages to post links. Under this new policy, if a business doesn’t pay for a Meta Verified account — which starts at $14.99/month/profile and goes all the way up to $499.99/month/profile — then they’ll be “limited to sharing links in 2 organic posts per month.”

To be clear, Meta is currently testing this policy with just a subset of business pages, so even if you manage a business page, you might not see anything about this. (FWIW, I haven’t received any notification of this on any of the business pages that I manage.) Also, this policy only affects business/professional accounts and pages; it does not affect personal Facebook accounts.

According to Matt Navarra, who has covered this extensively on Bluesky, Meta is running this test “to understand whether the ability to publish an increased volume of posts with links add additional value for Meta Verified subscribers.” Even so, any such limitations on sharing links is just more proof that social media platforms are not to be trusted by publishers. If Meta rolls this policy out to all pages, then it would be yet another instance of them undermining publishers, similar to what happened when they encouraged everyone to pivot to video, with disastrous results. As Hutchinson writes:

[W]ith its reformation in approach around news content in particular, it did, at one stage earlier this year, seem that Meta might be giving link posts more reach in its apps yet again. That’s not indicated in the chart above, but some publishers had reported seeing a rise in referral links from Facebook after it switched to its Community Notes-led approach.

This announcement negates that, and underlines, once again, why you can’t trust Meta for traffic, because Meta will do whatever it derives the most benefit from, at any given time. Which, of course, also makes business sense, but social media managers should remember this when Meta prompts them to post more Reels, or really, offers any tips to get more reach. Definitely, you should take note of such advice, but you should also try not to build any reliance on the engagement and/or traffic gains that you see as a result.

Over the years, I’ve established several soapboxes here on Opus. Shoegaze is awesome, as are samurai and ninja movies. We should interact with culture thoughtfully and critically, not fearfully. Never Trump. And finally, people should own their own online platforms, even if they’re not a company or, say, a nerdy pop culture blogger.

The best approach to publishing online is to not rely on Facebook et al. as your primary channel. Instead, create your own website or blog — which is far easier than you might realize — and encourage people to follow you there, where you’ll both be free from social media restrictions and algorithms. (This is often referred to as the POSSE mindset, i.e., Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.)

No matter the size of your audience or the nature of your site (personal, professional, etc.), you will be far better served by having your readers visit a site that you control rather than relying on social media platforms to do right by your content. Because, as evidenced by this latest activity from Meta, that will never happen.