Because Meta and Facebook exist to torment those of us who work in digital for causes, yet another new and unwelcome change is coming down the line – external links in organic posts will be limited to two per month, for business Pages.
This link limitation change is being rolled out and tested now, and is expected to apply to all Pages soon. Unless you subscribe to ‘Meta One for Business’, their new premium subscription service. Looks like links in posts will only be available on the $50 per month and up tiers, not on the cheapest tiers.
What it means in practice
You’ll only be able to include external links in two posts per month from your official Page. This includes links in comments – that’s not a workaround, unfortunately.
It doesn’t affect ads – you can still run ads with external links. It also doesn’t apply to personal profiles so far, just Pages.
Why it’s not as bad as it sounds
Well, it’s kind of bad, Facebook are jerks for doing this. But I’ve seen a lot of data from different charity social media pages, and very few are driving significant traffic to websites any more.
There’s been a long trend of Facebook (and other social channels too) favouring content that keeps people on their platform. This isn’t really a major loss, as the tactic of using organic Facebook posts to drive people to click calls to action wasn’t working for most charities anyway.
What should charities do now?
Firstly, if you were posting a lot of external links to Facebook, do a rigorous evaluation of how they performed. Specifically:
- What was the average reach per post?
- What were the average number of engagements and engagement rate per post?
- What was the average number of link clicks per post?
- How many conversions and how much income is attributed to organic Facebook?
Get Digital Charity Lab’s free guide to social media metrics to help with this evaluation
Definitely use averages rather than total reach / engagements in this analysis, because you need to evaluate how the average post tends to perform. And calculating total reach or engagements, won’t pinpoint if posts were persistently going to the same small audience.
If you were getting good results here – and ‘good’ specifically means reach in the thousands, an engagement rate of 5%+, and meaningful income and conversions coming in from every post with a call to actio – then you’ll need something to replace this. Meta Ads are the obvious choice.
If (and this is much more common) your organic Facebook posts were only reaching an average of a few hundred, only engaging a few people per post, and not driving measurable results, then it wasn’t working anyway. Look at a different strategy for Facebook, and also examine your results on other social channels too, using the same evaluation.
Facebook strategies that work for charities
Top of funnel
Use impact stories and engagement pieces to build an engaged audience on Meta. No links, just self-contained content that can be consumed in the feed.
Content tactics that work:
- Impact stories – inspiring examples of how people were helped by your cause
- Explainers – break down hard to understand concepts, use carousels or videos to go through information in bite-size steps
- Polls, questions – invite engagement from your audience. Ensure it’s focused on your cause and messaging. I.e. no ‘vote for your favourite crisps’ polls unless you’re a crisp-based charity – that’s engagement bait and it won’t find the right audience.
Use ads with the engagement objective to promote this content and grow an engaged, relevant audience. A useful tactic is: test the content organically first. Whichever performs best, turn it into an ad with an engagement objective.
See a free webinar about an audience-building strategy for Meta
Middle funnel
Save the audience you’ve engaged with Meta’s Audiences tool.
Use that audience in ad targeting – you can target them directly if it’s a large enough audience, or use it to create lookalike audiences. Test different ad targeting in different ad sets – broad audience vs lookalike. Broad is usually best but engaged or lookalike can outperform it in many campaign types.
Focus on lead generation campaigns with your paid Meta programme – an ad format that allows you to capture a user’s data so you can move them to a more direct and effective channel, namely email or phone.
The political / social ads ban (another kick in our faces from Meta, thanks Meta!) means that we need to use softer, less advocacy-based language than previously. But lead campaigns can definitely still be run – test lead magnets like:
- ‘Handraisers’ – ask people to pledge their support to your cause
- Discount codes on events or shop products
- Free information downloads
- ‘Value exchange’ campaigns offering a free gift
Use softer language to get people onto your mailing list – and then you can go into more detail and be more hard-hitting in your email content, which is none of Meta’s business.
More on Facebook Ad strategy for charities
You can also look at using tools like ManyChat to move people from organic social, to DMs, to data capture and direct activation. There’s some great case studies about how this was done for the Mamdani political campaign in New York – see one from Rachel Karten, another from Forward Action.
Bottom funnel
Conversion ads (i.e. direct donation asks) have become a lot more expensive in recent years, due to changes in tracking that make it harder to feed the conversion data back to Meta. They can still be done profitably but require significant budgets – the days of doing Facebook ads for €500 are well behind us. There’s also the political / social ad ban to consider – any fundraising ads have to use very careful language.
A much more affordable approach is to use lead campaigns as outlined above, and do the conversion work through email journeys and / or telemarketing. You’ll get excellent long term value out of lead campaigns, as you’ll have multiple opportunities to contact and convert the leads.
What do you think? Is this the final straw for you where Facebook is concerned? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments…
Illustration by pch.vector on magnific.com