An Ad Solution for Meta's Restriction on Organic Link Sharing

This is the ad solution to Meta’s new link restrictions.

So you probably know all about Meta’s new restrictions on link shares for businesses.

If you’re not sure, and if you’ve been living under a rock, listen to my episode from last week where I rant about how absurd and unreasonable it is.

The main thing to understand is that you won’t be able to share more than two Facebook or Instagram posts per month with a link in it.

And if you’re wondering, no, you can’t get around that restriction by adding links to the comments.

They’re counted, too.

Of course, Meta did this as they announced Meta One, with four tiers priced between $14.99 and $499 per month.

And one of the primary benefits of the three most expensive tiers, of course, is increasing the limit on links you can share.

But as I laid out last week, those limits may not even match what you normally did before this restriction went into effect.

Even if you go with the $499 per month option, Facebook posts with links are unlimited, but you’re still limited to 12 Instagram posts with links.

And at $149, you’re limited to 20 Facebook posts and 8 Instagram posts with links.

It’s reasonable to assume that your business may be sharing a link per day, if not many more than that.

So maybe you don’t want to pay for Meta One, but you have to replace the traffic you’ve driven with these organic posts.

Understand, I’m not just talking to businesses who have avoided running ads up until now.

I run ads, but I also post organically and share links.

Good marketing is about a combination of paid and organic efforts to drive people to the things you own.

And while organic link sharing still has value for me, I can’t say it has even $149 per month of value at the moment.

At one time, yeah, sharing links to Facebook was freaking amazing, but those days have passed.

There’s also the matter of the types of links I’m sharing when it’s to my page.

The organic links I share are to blog posts and podcast episodes, so they’re not driving direct revenue.

And while I’ve experimented with running ads for this type of content in the past, I’ve mostly found it to not be cost effective.

But I was also approaching those ads differently then.

Let’s say instead of spending that $149 per month on Meta One, I put it toward more advertising to replace that traffic.

And to do that, I’m going to recommend a very old school approach.

Remember I’m promoting blog posts and podcast episodes, so I don’t have a typical conversion to optimize for.

I could optimize for a custom event related to website activity, but I want to push you toward something that anyone can use.

Ultimately, you’re going to want to optimize for something high up the funnel.

I’m not going to tell you there’s one option here, so feel free to experiment.

But obvious options for performance goals would be to maximize reach or the number of link clicks, landing page views, or interactions.

And these are all things I would normally not recommend.

Since we’re trying to drive traffic, video views or ThruPlay views wouldn’t be good options.

Again, remember that we’re replacing traffic that was previously driven organically from our page, so that matters when we talk this through.

That’s why I’m also going to tell you to restrict targeting to your Facebook and Instagram followers, which can be done with custom audiences.

I know, this all sounds crazy because I would never normally recommend this, but there’s a method to the madness here.

If you’re going to promote blog posts and podcast episodes where a bottom funnel conversion action isn’t the goal, you’ll need to set strict guardrails.

This is one of those situations that is an exception to my typical recommendations of being hands off related to targeting and placements.

You need to take control in these cases or Meta will exploit weaknesses to find the cheapest, and likely lowest quality, optimized actions.

That’s because we’re not optimizing for a conversion.

So restrict your targeting to your Facebook and Instagram followers, and also consider limiting the number of countries you reach.

When it comes to placements, you will actually need to remove some here, which is something I’d never recommend when optimizing for a conversion.

While Meta is eliminating placement control, that’s only for the bottom of the funnel.

You can still do it here.

What you remove will depend on the performance goal you use.

If you optimize for link clicks or landing page views, you should at least remove audience network.

If you optimize for reach, you should remove ads on Facebook reels.

These are placements that will be wasted because they can get you very cheap clicks or views, depending on what you’re optimizing for.

And those clicks and views are rarely high quality, even if you limit the audience.

You might be able to use value rules in some cases to limit this, but not all placements are available.

So I’d start there with placement control, but you can remove more if you want to focus on feeds, reels, and stories to mimic what you might do with a social share.

Just know that there’s likely a balance between control and costs, since it will be more expensive as you limit your placements.

I have to keep reminding you that this is a rare exception because I know this sounds like nothing I would normally recommend.

Because I don’t want you applying these recommendations when optimizing for conversions.

In most cases, I’d give you a side eye for talking about doing this.

So once you’ve set this up, make it a habit of moving your organic publishing routine to this single ad set.

Instead of publishing today’s blog post to your page, publish an ad that promotes it.

And every time you have a new blog post or podcast episode, create a new ad.

Ultimately, you will end up with up to 50 ads in an ad set, and that’s good.

Allow Meta to show different blog posts and podcast episodes.

And if you optimize for reach, they should be shown more or less evenly, rather than focusing on one or two that convert the most.

You can even set frequency controls like a frequency cap or target to control how often your followers are seeing these ads.

You obviously don’t want to exhaust them.

And you can do all of this at a very reasonable budget, depending on the size of your remarketing audience.

Since we’re doing this instead of spending $149 per month on Meta One, let’s start out by setting a $5 daily budget, which comes out to about $150 per month.

If you’re a big brand with huge social media audiences, you may consider signing up for Meta One instead anyway.

Now, you might be wondering, “But Jon, if you’re willing to pay $150 more per month for ads, why not just pay for Meta One to share more links?”

And it’s a reasonable question.

The problem is that Meta has devalued link sharing over the years by throttling reach for businesses.

With ads, I can guarantee a certain amount of delivery.

Will $150 of ads be better than the $149 paid for Meta One?

We’ll see, but my hunch is that it would be.

So here’s the bottom of the glass.

Meta is creating a dilemma for businesses by restricting link sharing on Facebook and Instagram.

While you’re going to hear about all kinds of organic hacks, I have my doubts about whether any of them will be particularly effective.

You just can’t expect to generate anywhere close to the same traffic by creating extra steps and hoops for people to jump through to click a link.

Your best opportunity is likely to replace that traffic with a very low, very controlled, very strategic daily budget on ads going to your followers.

And if anyone tells you this sounds crazy and outdated, just nod and say, “I know, I know, it is.”

But sometimes we have to find creative solutions for unreasonable problems, and that includes taking a page out of an outdated playbook.