Facebook has been buzzing lately about...well, Facebook.

In case you missed it, business pages are now (or soon going to) only be allowed two links per month unless you upgrade (aka pay them) for more.

If I was in charge of your parish's social media, here's how I would change our strategy as a result:

Step One:

First, I would scream into the void.

(But seriously...it's not just you. Everything is harder to promote now than it was years ago. And upgrading to get more links is...not cheap. It's frustrating, 100%.)

Step Two:

Once I felt my feelings, I'd come up with a plan. But before that, I'd look through the month of September and see how many links I'd actually posted.

Then, I'd tally how many I'd done in the following categories:

• Our own website > Events
• Our own website > All other links
• Other websites (Vatican, Catholic blogs/media, etc.)

Step Three:

The next thing I would do is try to understand why the update is being made. In other words, what is Facebook telling us about the function of the platform and the algorithm with this?

(Aside from corporate greed.)

They want to keep people on the platform. They don't want people leaving Facebook to look at something else because the longer people stay on the platform, the more money they make from ads.

So we have to shift our thinking on Facebook from being a place to send people to our external sites to keeping them on the platform. In other words, thinking outside the box about how we can share the information we would have sent them out to on Facebook itself.

Step Four:

I would then adjust my social media strategy accordingly. There's a few options I'd consider, depending on what my social media goals were:

1. Treat Facebook like Instagram. Pretend like you can't have clickable links, and direct people to the link in your bio, spell out the link without adding the .com on the end, or use a service like ManyChat to have people comment a word that then messages them with the clickable link directly.
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2. Put links in comments (some people are already reporting that this is counting toward the total, but you can see if it is a workaround for now).
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3. Start using built-in Facebook features like Events to share things instead of sending them out to external sites.
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4. Put everything I want people to know into Facebook. For example, instead of linking out to the bulletin, uploading the pages as images to be read right on Facebook.
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5. Create a dedicated "links" page on the parish website, which is linked from Facebook, and then direct people to that centralized link which would be routinely updated with whatever is being promoted on social media.

Step 5:

The final thing I think this would force me to do if I wasn't already is planning ahead.

I'd look at the whole month the month before to figure out what were the two most important things people needed to know this month on our parish's website.

That way, we wouldn't waste those two valuable clickable links.

To be honest, links on Facebook were already not getting seen as much, so it is a good opportunity to refresh our strategies, albeit an annoying one.

And at the end of the day, as much as it might always seem like it, God is in charge, not Meta.

And there is no algorithm greater than God's will. So breathe, adjust, post, and pray.

God's got this.

For His greater glory,

Emily

P.S. Oh, and this would also make me prioritize even more having an email list I actively used! We don't own these social media platforms, and as we can see, the rules can change at any time and change things. But once you have your parishioners' emails, you can market to them any time, no matter how the algorithm is feeling that day.