Is Facebook dead for VCSE organisations?
Facebook has been declared dead more times than I can remember, and yet here we are, still talking about it.
For many voluntary, community and social enterprise (VCSE) organisations, Facebook remains an important part of their communications. It is where their communities are, where they share opportunities and events, where people find out what is happening locally and, quite often, where organisations direct people towards their websites, services and resources.
But some fairly significant changes are happening at Meta, which brings a headache in itself as we try to unpick what they are actually saying and, importantly, what it means for the sector.
I have tried to absorb as much information as possible so I can make sense of the changes, advise my clients and help them make the best use of the limited capacity and resources they are already managing.
Fundamentally, from everything I have read and understood so far, this does not need to be the end of the road for Facebook as a way of connecting with our target audiences. We do, however, need to be prepared to adapt how we use it and, importantly, how we measure its value.
So, what is actually changing?
In September, Meta announced Meta One, a new subscription service offering additional features across its platforms, including specific packages for businesses and creators.
Meta has been clear that Facebook itself is not suddenly becoming a paid platform. In its announcement, it says:
“The core experience across our apps and Meta AI will stay free.”
However, it goes on to explain that subscriptions will unlock more specialised capabilities beyond that free experience.
For businesses and creators, Meta says it recognises that growing an audience involves everything from creating content and understanding what resonates to “standing out with new audiences”. Its paid packages are designed to provide additional tools to help with that.
This is where things get interesting.
There are different subscription levels available, and the lower-priced Essential package is currently around £12 a month in the UK. Among its features is the ability to add links to your profile.
That might sound like a relatively small feature, but for charities and VCSE organisations using Facebook to direct people towards their website, services or other useful information, it is worth paying attention to. Something as basic as having your website link available from your profile may now require a subscription.
Then there is the Advanced business package, which starts at $49.99 (roughly £40) a month, although Meta says prices, features and availability can vary depending on region, app and account.
Among the features included in that Advanced package are advanced publishing tools, “links in organic posts and reels”, exportable analytics and deeper audience insights.
External links have been a pretty fundamental part of how many organisations use Facebook and, crucially, something we have been able to do for free for years.
So while Meta is right when it says the core Facebook experience will remain free, the more interesting question for organisations is what that free experience will actually allow us to do.
One of the key things I talk to my clients about is remembering that we don't own our social media platforms. We are ultimately at the mercy of changing algorithms, features and, sometimes, the success or failure of the platforms themselves (X is perhaps the most obvious example of how quickly a platform can change).
That is why I have always encouraged organisations to use social media to gain attention and then, where appropriate, bring people back into the spaces they do own, such as their website or email list, where there is much greater opportunity to build a deeper relationship.
In practice, that has often been pretty simple: create a useful resource and share the link, promote an event and share the booking link, publish a blog and direct people to it, or launch a new service and send people to your website to find out more.
For VCSE organisations in particular, Facebook has often acted as a really useful signpost to somewhere else.
And that is what makes these changes particularly interesting. We aren't necessarily talking about flashy additional features that small organisations could happily live without. Some of the functionality being placed within paid packages relates directly to how organisations move people from Facebook into the spaces they actually own.
So what happens when some of the tools that help us do that start sitting behind a subscription?
And then there is the question of reach
I recently read a blog from Dan Slee which gives a really useful breakdown of the Meta One packages, he unpicked the ‘Advanced’ package highlighting that one of the features of this package includes:
“Your posts can get shown to people beyond your followers.”
Now, Meta is not explicitly saying that organisations without an Advanced subscription will no longer reach people beyond their existing followers, but the fact that this is being promoted as a benefit of the paid package certainly raises questions about what reach will look like for those who don't subscribe.
For a small charity or community organisation, £40 a month is not insignificant. That is around £480 a year which could be spent on delivering services, supporting volunteers, running activities or, dare I say it, paying somebody to help them improve their communications.
So I think there is a much bigger question here than whether organisations should subscribe to Meta One:
Do we need to rethink what we expect Facebook to do for us and whether there are other ways of achieving the same thing.
Because Meta isn't the only thing changing
Earlier this week I attended a webinar from Social for Good which explored the changing ways people are behaving on social media. The team shared a short clip from Gina Sipley, Ph.D., author of Just Here for the Comments: Lurking as Digital Literacy Practice, who gave a brief overview of how our behaviour is changing
We are increasingly aware of the potential impact social media can have on our mental wellbeing. We are more conscious of what we say publicly and what that might mean for our reputations, both personally and professionally. We are also navigating online spaces where opinions can feel increasingly polarised and, sometimes, it simply feels easier and safer to stay quiet.
That does not necessarily mean people are leaving social media or that they are not paying attention.
Instead, people can be consuming content much more quietly. They are scrolling, reading, watching, learning and thinking without necessarily following the account, liking the post, leaving a comment or sharing it publicly.
This is sometimes referred to as “lurking”, and it creates a bit of a headache for anyone trying to demonstrate whether their social media activity is actually working.
Imagine somebody sees a post from your organisation about a service that could help their mum. They read it but do not like it because why would they? They do not comment because they do not particularly want everyone they know to see that their family might need support. They do not follow your Page because they are not interested in seeing everything you publish. But they remember your organisation and a week later, they search for you, visit your website and give you a call.
That Facebook post has done its job beautifully, but if you are measuring its success through likes, comments and new followers, it looks like it did absolutely nothing and that is incredibly frustrating.
The numbers we can see are not necessarily the whole story
This is why I think we need to be increasingly careful about the numbers we use to judge whether social media is working.
Follower growth is useful to know. Engagement is useful to know. Reach is useful to know. Website traffic is useful to know. But none of those numbers, individually, tells us whether our communications are achieving what we actually need them to achieve.
The platforms themselves only give us part of the picture, and they have access to far more information about our behaviour than they make available to organisations publishing content.
So if visible engagement is becoming less common, we need to be careful not to interpret a lack of likes or comments as a lack of impact.
Someone does not have to click a thumbs-up button for your content to have made them think, feel or act.
So, is Facebook still worth it for VCSE organisations?
I think it absolutely can be, but that depends on a much more important question.
Are the people you need to communicate with actually there?
If your beneficiaries, volunteers, supporters or local community use Facebook, then it makes very little sense to abandon it simply because engagement rates are not what they once were or because Meta has introduced another paid package.
But I do think we need to become more intentional about how we use it.
For years, a lot of organisational social media has followed a fairly predictable pattern. We publish something on our website, write a social media post telling people about it, add a link and ask them to leave the platform to read it. When you think about it from Meta's perspective, it isn't particularly surprising that they would rather we kept people on Facebook.
If links become more restricted, or simply become less effective, perhaps the question becomes: how can we give people more of the value while they are already there?
Instead of telling people you have written five tips and asking them to visit your website to discover what they are, give them the five tips.
Instead of sharing a link to a resource with very little context, tell people what is useful about it and share some of the information within the post.
Instead of treating Facebook primarily as a signpost, create content that is useful even if the person consuming it never leaves Facebook.
That does not mean links suddenly become irrelevant. If you need someone to book an event, make a referral, apply for something, donate or access a service, there will obviously be times when getting them to take that next step really matters. It just means we might need to become much more intentional about when we ask them to do it and think about whether we are in a position to pay for the privilege or not.
Perhaps Facebook isn't dead, but the way we currently use it is
I do not think these changes mean VCSE organisations should panic, abandon Facebook or immediately find another £500 in their annual communications budget to pay for the Advanced package of Meta One.
There is still a lot we do not know about how the changes will affect organic reach and linking in practice, particularly for organisations using Facebook for free.
What I do think they give us is another reason to question some of the habits we have fallen into with social media.
Are we posting because we have something useful to communicate, or because we feel like we should be posting?
Are we creating content for the people we want to reach, or simply feeding the platform?
Are we measuring what actually matters, or focusing on likes and follower numbers because they are easy to count?
Are we giving people something useful where they already are, or constantly asking them to go somewhere else?
And perhaps most importantly, are we building a communications approach that is bigger than any individual social media platform?
Because Facebook might not be dead, but it is rented space. Meta decides how it works, what we can measure, who sees our content and, increasingly, which features we need to pay for.
That does not make Facebook useless.
It just makes having a clear purpose for being there more important than ever.