What’s Next for Facebook? 4 Changes Businesses Can’t Ignore

Wondering how to keep driving traffic and leads from Facebook now that Meta limits how many links you can share? Want to know how to use Meta’s Muse AI agent, the Forum groups app, and Meta Business Agents in your Facebook marketing?

​In this article, you’ll discover how to work around Facebook’s two-link-per-month limit, how to use Meta’s Muse AI agent safely, and how to put Meta’s new AI tools for groups, Messenger, and lead ads to work for your business.

#1: How to Keep Driving Facebook Traffic Under the Two-Link Limit

Meta now limits Facebook pages and personal profiles to two posts with external links per month unless the account pays for a Meta One subscription. Meta tested the limit with select pages in December 2025 and is now enforcing it more widely. Publisher pages belonging to media companies are reportedly exempt.

​The limit covers links in any post, whether it’s a link post, a photo post, or a video post. It also counts links placed in the comments, the workaround many marketers have relied on for years. Once an account reaches the limit, it can still post a link, but the link won’t be clickable. Facebook previewed the change over the past 10 to 12 months, as links added in comments on other people’s posts gradually stopped rendering as clickable.

​Mari Smith sees the limit as a push to keep people on Facebook rather than sending them off-platform, and to drive a new revenue stream. It’s a big change for for-profit marketers and nonprofits that rely on Facebook for website traffic and leads. Her advice is to become far more strategic about the links that do get shared and to move the rest of that traffic through channels that the limit doesn’t touch.

How to Decide Whether Meta One Is Worth Paying For

Meta One raises the link cap, but most tiers still have one. The Advanced tier costs $50 per month and allows 8 links per month on Facebook and 4 on Instagram. Unlimited Facebook links require the $500-per-month tier, which still caps Instagram at 12 links per month. All Meta One plans include the verified badge, and according to the plan’s fine print, they also include advanced AI-powered audience insights.

​Businesses already paying $15 per month for Meta Verified don’t need both. Mari expects Meta Verified to eventually be absorbed into the Meta One plans and disappear as a separate product.

​For most businesses, Mari recommends skipping both subscriptions. Subscribers report that they still can’t get support, and paying for links comes with no guarantee of reach.

​A better use of the same budget is boosting “unicorns,” Mari’s term for a page’s best-performing posts. The process works in three stages:

1. Publish organic posts and treat them as tests.
   
   
2. Watch the algorithm’s feedback to see which posts travel furthest among both followers and non-followers.
   
   
3. Put money behind the winners, either with the Boost button or, ideally, directly in Ads Manager.

How to Share Clickable Links Without Using Up the Limit

Mari has published a blog post with 15 workarounds for the link limit. The 15th is paying for ads, which leaves 14 organic options. These are the ones she highlights.

​Deliver Links Through DMs: Meta has spent years pushing more activity into direct messages, which makes DMs the most natural home for links. Meta Business Suite includes a free comment trigger that works like third-party tools such as ManyChat. 

A post invites people to comment with a specific keyword, and anyone who does automatically receives a DM with the link. A page can run several comment triggers, and a team member can step into any of those conversations as a real person.

​Rotate the Page’s Main Action Button: Every Facebook page comes with a main action button. Changing it periodically to different calls to action keeps a clickable path to the website open without spending one of the two monthly link posts.

​Link to Meta Properties: The two-link limit applies to external, third-party sites, including a business’s own website. Links to Meta properties are exempt, so posts can still link to an Instagram account, a Facebook event, or a Facebook group.

​Pin the Most Important Link: A single post containing the main lead magnet, shop, or subscription offer, pinned to the featured section, stays clickable and visible long after it’s published.

​Put Links in Stories: Mari doesn’t expect links in Facebook Stories to be limited for now. Story links keep a business top-of-mind and give followers a clickable path.

​Use a Memorable URL or QR Code: A short vanity URL that people can easily retype, spoken in a video, or shown on screen gets around the limit entirely. A QR code works the same way.

#2: How to Use Meta Muse for Low-Risk Marketing Tasks

Muse is Meta’s always-on AI agent, positioned as a personal agent for marketers and content creators that remembers context and preferences over time. Unlike a chat assistant, Muse is built to complete tasks end-to-end. Given a goal, it makes a plan, opens its own browser, fills out forms, sends emails, and keeps working even after the app is closed, returning for input only when it needs approval.

​Muse for Small Business extends the agent into a company’s marketing stack. It plugs directly into a Facebook page, Instagram analytics, and ad accounts, plus outside tools such as Shopify, QuickBooks, Klaviyo, and Canva. Other early partners include Slack, Zoom, Asana, Dropbox, and Figma.

​According to Mari, Muse’s main advantage is the data it can see. A general AI assistant like ChatGPT or Claude only knows what it’s been told in conversation. Muse can see years of a business’s actual data on Meta and report what’s working and what isn’t, across a base of about 200 million small businesses on Meta’s platforms. Muse reached 2.8 million downloads in its first two weeks, despite Meta’s reputation as one of the least trusted companies on the planet.

How to Set Up Muse Without Taking on Risk

Meta says Muse won’t publish content, send messages, or make purchases without a user’s approval. The permissions a user grants still matter. In one widely shared story, a man who had listed a keyboard on Facebook Marketplace had apparently enabled permissions in Muse. The agent chatted with a buyer, confirmed the keyboard was available, and shared the seller’s address, so the buyer showed up at the door before the seller knew he existed.

​To keep the risk low, Mari recommends three ground rules:

1. Start with analysis. Ask Muse to analyze content performance to inform better decisions going forward.
   
   
2. Hand it behind-the-scenes work next, such as reporting, ad insights, and admin tasks.
   
   
3. Be deliberate about which accounts get connected and what Muse is allowed to approve.

Muse also offers a partial workaround for personal profiles that third-party scheduling tools can’t post to. Muse can’t schedule a post in the traditional sense. But when given the post text and a time, it will publish the post at that time. The workaround is limited to text-only posts, with no images or video.

​Muse isn’t widely available worldwide yet. Businesses without access aren’t missing anything urgent.

How to Prepare a Business for Customers Who Shop Through AI Agents

Mari’s bigger point about Muse is that it’s a preview of how customers will shop. When people hand an agent a goal such as finding a gift, booking a dinner, or comparing three options, the agent will conduct research, choose the best option, and purchase it. Part of every business’s marketing now has to work with AI as well as with a person.

​Getting ready for agent shoppers comes down to four things:

• Product information should be clean and machine-readable.
  
  
• Pricing should be clear.
  
  
• Reviews should be solid.
  
  
• The website and social content should make it clear what the business offers and what someone can buy, so an agent can find the right product, know where to click, and complete the purchase.

The human who gave the agent its instructions still has to be won over, too.

​The same shift is coming to advertising. Mark Zuckerberg has said he wants advertisers to name the product or service and the budget and let Meta handle the rest. Meta’s AI can already check a business’s website, create ads with AI-generated images and videos, and use Advantage+ features to handle targeting.

#3: How to Decide Whether Facebook Groups and the Forum App Are Worth the Time

Meta has fully rolled out Forum, a dedicated smartphone app for Facebook groups that brings all of a person’s communities into one place. Facebook groups are still growing, and the separate app is meant to drive even more usage. Forum currently has no ads. Its comments scroll left to right instead of up and down, and it surfaces comments a member missed and suggests groups to join. A Facebook account is still required to use it.

​Forum also includes Ask, an AI-powered tool built on Meta AI that answers questions using existing Facebook posts and comments. Answers include a summary, bullet points, and linked sources, and tapping a source opens the public group where the discussion took place. 

Ask mainly draws on public groups. Private group content generally won’t appear unless it’s anonymized. Private groups can ask members to feature their posts, and each member decides whether to opt in. Prospective members then see those posts as anonymized previews, which Ask may also draw on.

​Admins of large, active groups and people who use Facebook mainly for groups will get the most out of Forum. For most businesses, Mari doesn’t see Forum playing a big role. She also doesn’t think businesses need a weekly or monthly routine of querying Ask to monitor their brand or industry.

How to Measure Whether a Group Earns Its Place

Mari judges Facebook groups by return on time, or ROT. Groups are for networking rather than selling, since pushy, salesy behavior doesn’t work there, and results come slowly. What a group does build is top of mind awareness, top-of-funnel interest, and authority, which is how Mari uses her own Social Scoop group. For businesses that do invest in groups, she favors running their own over only participating in others. For the vast majority of businesses, though, groups belong fairly low in the marketing mix.

How to Run a Pop-Up Group for a Course or Paid Program

Pop-up groups are where Mari sees the clearest business use for groups. A pop-up group is a Facebook group that’s open for a finite time and has a specific purpose that’s clear to everyone who joins. Setting one up involves three decisions:

1. Define the purpose and the end date before launching, and state both when people join.
   
   
2. Make the group private.
   
   
3. Gate entry with a membership question or, for a paid program, the email address the member used to buy.

Mari runs pop-up groups for her courses. She’s also offering one for about 10 days as a bonus for people who buy a third-party ads training through her affiliate link.

​Forum can make a pop-up group easier for participants who aren’t active on Facebook. They can download Forum and turn on notifications only for that group, which keeps them engaged without the noise of everything else. For an ongoing community attached to a course, Mari uses Mighty Networks instead and keeps her Facebook group for general purposes.

#4: How to Use Meta Business Agents to Book Appointments and Sell in Messenger

Meta Business Agents are Messenger agents powered by Meta AI. They answer questions, recommend products, ask qualifying questions, and book appointments right in the DM thread. Meta has also added appointment booking directly in Facebook lead ads, where the thank-you page includes a calendar widget that works with Calendly, HubSpot, and HighLevel. Meta is testing direct checkout inside AI-powered conversations with PayPal, Shopify, and Stripe.

​Most Meta Business Agents currently work within ads. When Mari tested agents on the pages of major brands such as KLM, Levi Strauss, and Sephora, none responded.

​The agents also tie into Meta’s interoperability across WhatsApp, Instagram Direct, Facebook Messenger, and Threads DMs. Wherever a customer first sees a business publicly, they can message it, and a business agent can warm up the prospect and move them toward a buying decision. For businesses hit by the link limit, this is another way to convert interest into action without a link post.

How to Keep Automated Conversations Feeling Helpful

Today’s agents act far more human-like than the rigid, phone-tree-style Messenger bots of 2017 and 2018, which fell apart the moment someone went off script. That flexibility makes the customer experience the focus of design. Mari’s test for any business agent is whether the customer felt helped or handled.

People don’t hate automation; they hate feeling trapped without a choice. A visible way to reach a person solves that. When Mari used ManyChat, the “talk to a human” button was her favorite feature, and people tapped it constantly.

How to Decide What to Sell Inside a Chat

In many parts of the world, buying inside a chat is already how commerce works, as WhatsApp shows, and North America is catching up. Mari expects buyers to get comfortable when three conditions are met: a familiar checkout, such as Shop Pay or PayPal; clear return policies; and a conversation that felt helpful before the buy button appeared.

Ticket size should drive the decision. Impulse and low-ticket purchases are easy to complete in chat. A $5,000 coaching program is different because buyers will want to feel the human relationship behind it.

How to Start Testing Meta’s New AI Tools

Mari recommends starting with the boring, high-ROI tools rather than the headline features:

1. Run a lead ad and turn on the book time option if appointments are part of the business model.
   
   
2. Try the Meta AI Business Assistant in Ads Manager for reporting and insights.
   
   
3. Wait on Muse until it’s widely available, then start with the low-stakes tasks above.
   
   
4. Skip in-chat checkout for now unless the business is a major brand, which likely already has early access.

Before automating a single conversation, Mari suggests a business ask what its customers feel when they talk to it today. Her rule: “Automate the answers and never the care.”

Other Notes From This Episode

• Connect with Michael Stelzner @Stelzner on Instagram and @Mike_Stelzner on X.
• Connect with Jerry Potter on LinkedIn and YouTube.
• Watch this interview and other exclusive content from Social Media Examiner on YouTube.

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