There's no such thing as a free (business) lunch on Instagram and Facebook

I've been saying for awhile that social media companies are a selfish lot.

When I talk to both entrepreneurs and established business owners who use social media for business, the most important thing I try to impress as they map out their marketing plans is that social media platforms aren't there to help your business. Their goal isn't to help you reach your audience or make sales, it's to make money for themselves.

The early days of social media marketing

One of the clearest examples of that self-serving behavior is the way the platforms limit and penalize external links in posts (links to websites that take users away from Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.)

In the early 2010s, when I was managing social media channels for The Saturday Evening Post, one of the biggest mistakes I could make was writing a post for Twitter or Facebook and forgetting to include a link to the story we were talking about.

It might seem like a little thing, but by the time I realized I'd forgotten the link and edited the post, anywhere from dozens to several hundred people could have already seen it. We'd missed the opportunity to drive that traffic to our website, which was the entire point of social media: create awareness that you were there, and bring them to your own website to convert them to repeat visitors and, eventually, subscribers.

But by the mid 2010s, marketers and social media managers were noticing that posts that had links in them were getting less likes and less shares, and that website traffic from social media platforms had declined. Researchers eventually realized this was because Facebook wasn't showing posts with links to users at the same rate as posts without links.

The push to keep you on social media

Facebook never communicated this change to business profile users, or to users themselves for that matter. We were all just supposed to assume this was a result of "optimizing for better user experience." Marketers and social media managers adapted as best they could, and audiences were trained to forget that posts ever really had links in the first place.

It was never, of course, about creating a better user experience. It was about money. Links that took users away from Facebook's platform cut into their time spent on Facebook, which cut into the number of ads they'd see, which cut into Facebook's ad revenue.

With that small change to keep users contained on the platform, Facebook netted millions more in ad revenue, and other platforms like LinkedIn, and eventually Instagram when Facebook bought and subsequently ruined it, followed suit. "Link in comments" may look like an annoying trend to you, but it's because it's the only safe place to share a link if you still want your posts to get seen.

Why am I bringing up old shit? Because we're about to enter the next era of Meta squeezing as much blood as it can from the small businesses on their platforms.

Paying for links on Facebook

If you intend to keep using Facebook and Instagram for business, you better start setting aside some cash to pay for a monthly subscription.

This December, Facebook began a "test" on some business accounts to limit organic posts with links to just 2 links per month—unless the profile owner is paying a monthly subscription for Facebook Verified.

Let's break this down:

A standard Facebook Verified subscription for a business costs $14.99 per month. For the first year. For one account. That means, if you have a Facebook page and an Instagram handle for your business, you'll need to pay $29.98 per month. After the first year, Meta will raise that monthly rate to whatever the new rate is for the year. As you can image, you don't get much for that standard plan, and the "best" features will run you up to $349.99 per month. (A full explanation of Meta Verified's tiers of service and costs is available here.)

If you're thinking this feels uncomfortably like the arrangement you're stuck in with every streaming service or cell phone provider you use right now, good. You're catching onto the game here.

Most small businesses use social media for 4 reasons:

1. They think they have to

2. They're told they have to

3. They don't know what else to do

4. It costs next to nothing to use it

The first two are just false, and the third thing is fixable (contact me, seriously). For the influencer, entrepreneur, solopreneur, and small business users who depend on social media to do business, the fourth one's about to fall apart too.

"But this is just a test," you might argue. "It doesn't mean they're actually going to do it." To that I'd say: Have you learned nothing from politics in the last 10 years?

If they're testing it, it means they're thinking about it as a viable way to make more money, and if they think they'll make more money, they're going to do it. It might look slightly different—maybe you'll get 3 links per month instead of 2; how generous!—but it will happen.

I want you to take a few minutes to pretend like it has already happened.

What would it mean if you could only share 2 links per month?

What offers or events would you have to prioritize?

Which ones would suffer?

What would it do to your ability to serve your customers?

What would it do to your bottom line?

And who's really going to benefit from this change? (This is a softball question, you guys.)

Maybe most importantly, how does it make you feel? Are you okay with that?

I'll leave you with this. Meta made $50 billion from ad revenue just in the third quarter of 2025 (including a nice chunk from scam ads it allows on the platform in exchange for the ad spend). Ad revenue it only made because you keep creating the content that people come to the platform to see. How much was your share in that windfall?

In life, we tend to cut off relationships that become one-sided, especially when we feel we're being taken advantage of. We do it in our personal lives, and we do it in business. Perhaps it's time to ask yourself if you're really in an equally beneficial relationship with social media.