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

0:00Mari Smith: Today's episode is brought to you by Social Media Marketing World and this year we've added something brand new, a creator track. You've watched them, now meet them. Daryl Eves, who has advised Mr. Beast and Arak, Adley Kinsman, whose channels average more than a billion views a month, plus Sean Cannell, Maria Wendt, Roberto, Blake, and more. They'll show you how they grew their audiences and how they keep them paying off. Join us April 1st through 3rd in Anaheim. Get your tickets at socialmediamarketingworld.info. That's socialmediamarketingworld.info.

0:37Welcome to the Social Media Marketing Podcast, helping you navigate the social media jungle. And now, here is your host, Michael Stelzner.

0:47Mari Smith: Hello, hello, hello. Thank you so much for joining me for the Social Media Marketing Podcast brought to you by Social Media Examiner. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner, and this is the podcast for marketers and business owners who want more exposure, more leads, and more sales. Today, Jerry Potter and I are exploring important updates from Facebook with our special guest and my very good friend, Mari Smith. Take it away, Jerry. All right, thanks, Mike. It's great to be here. There's some big Facebook changes to discuss, including how they're cracking down even further on organic link sharing, even on personal profiles and in the comments.

1:19So is paying going to be the only way to drive traffic to our websites going forward? And it's official, a separate app dedicated to only one part of Facebook is fully rolled out. And I may be a big signal for where Meta is headed and the whole platform. And everyone has been talking about Meta's new AI agent, Muse. Even if you haven't heard about it, we're going to talk about exactly what it can do for marketers and business owners. And is it worth adding to your growing list of AI tools? We're very excited to be joined by Mari Smith. Mari is a leading expert on Facebook marketing and author of The New Relationship Marketing.

1:51She helps small and medium-sized businesses master organic Facebook marketing through consulting, training, and coaching. Today, Mari, Mike, and I are going to explore what these latest updates from Facebook mean for small business marketers and owners like you. Mari, welcome back to the show. Thank you so much. Happy to be here. So I want to start with this limitation on organic link sharing because I've seen you talking about it as well. And so Meta is limiting pages and profiles to two link posts per month unless they subscribe to a paid Meta 1 plan, which seems to be where we're all getting pushed.

2:23They originally tested this with select pages like in December of 2025, but now we're seeing it enforced in more places. Supposedly publisher pages like the media are exempt from it, but it definitely applies to the rest of us. And, you know, the Meta's widely viewed content report has been reporting that the number of views on posts with links keeps going down. It's under 2 % in the first quarter of 2026. So this all sounds like, oh my gosh, the world's ending. Facebook is not going to work for businesses anymore. But I would love to know just honestly, how big a deal do you think this is? Because again, my gut reaction is I'm so frustrated with this.

2:59Like a lot of people that I've seen on Facebook talking about it. But, you know, for providing value, does this just kind of force us to be more strategic with the links we do share? It does, Jerry. Absolutely. 100 % that of being more strategic with the links you share. And it is a pretty big deal for a lot of marketers and for profit, but also for nonprofit. I see some folks in my community pushing back about that. And to be to be absolutely clear here, this is not just a link in your post, whether it's an actual link post or it's a photo post or a video post. It also is counting the link in the comment because that's marketers.

3:34Mari Smith: Really? OK. Yep. Yep. So maybe a lot of people are saying, you know, oh, my God, well, how are they going to know what will happen? Will I just be prevented from posting it? you will be able to still post it but it won't be an active link now interestingly enough we actually saw a little sneak preview of this those cheeky monkeys that meta is facebook is within the last i would say probably within the last 10 12 months slowly but surely if you went to make a comment on someone else's post that had a link in it that link was not clickable i noticed that did you notice that mike yeah and i'm like because i had my team go in and try to respond to some people with a link and it would not render the link.

4:11Mari Smith: And I had to do it myself. Wow. Those. So that's been in the works for many, many months. And so this has been the buildup, the buildup where it's like, ah, okay, we can still post links. They just won't be clickable. And it's really frustrating to a lot of marketers who rely on Facebook for traffic, of course, for leads, you know, driving their audience to their website in particular. But, you know, Fortunately, there are workarounds, which we'll talk about in a moment. But yeah, this is absolutely to drive people to MetaOne, the new subscription, presumably making the platform more. Well, some people are saying without so many like spammy links, that's one maybe agenda going on here, minimizing all the rubbish links.

4:55But I think the number one agenda is keep people on the site, keep those eyeballs glued to the site, not take them off platform and driving a potential other revenue source. you know. And even with meta one, there's a limit to how many you can share depending on what tier you're at, right? It's not like, cool, I'm paying for it. I can do it as much as I want. Yes, exactly. I know. And it's really like, even at the advanced level at 50 bucks a month, you're getting only eight links a month on Facebook and four on Instagram. You have to go all the way up to 500 bucks a month to get unlimited on Facebook and 12 on Instagram.

5:28Yeah. By the way, all plans do include the verified badge. So a lot of my audience were so confused. Wait a minute, I'm paying 15 bucks a month for MetaVerify. Do I now need this Meta1 as well? It's like, is it both founder or, but eventually MetaVerify will just be absorbed into the Meta1 plans and we won't have MetaVerify at all, I don't think. Oh, you think it'll go away. Okay. So if we're looking at this as I need to drive traffic to my site and this has been working for me and now I'm being limited. I guess what I'm wondering about is if I was actually considering, you know, signing up for Meta1 so that I could keep sharing links and who knows, maybe links will become more special now like if you are one of those people that that signs up but is there any tracking because like with paid ads we can track their return on ad spend down to the penny practically but i don't know if there's much tracking with this right it does come with insights advanced ai powered insights on your audience and presumably and i don't know yeah because i'm not subscribed but it does say in the small print that there are insights there and yeah that's one of the benefits they keep touting can i just ask a clarifying question

6:29Mari Smith: And if we have only two links per month and we've got a bunch of people commenting and are we moving towards maybe just like, hey, I'll DM you the link. Is that kind of where we're going with this kind of like Instagram, do you think? Absolutely. And Meta has been on a mission to drive more DMs for the longest time, literally years. Zuckerberg has often said that there's more activity happens in the DMs than even publicly on social. And so that's certainly one of my tips. I wrote up a blog post of 15 workarounds, if you will. Well, one of the 15th one is to pay for ads. So really it's 14 organic workarounds.

7:03And absolutely driving into the DMs is a great way to go. And by the way, in Meta Business Suite, you can set up for free a comment trigger. I don't know if a lot of folks know that, but it's basically like the third party tools such as ManyChat. There's other ones that's the most popular to, you know, when you tell your audience comment with the word, whatever the word is, and then it automatically sends a DM. So you can do that for free inside of Meta Business Suite. You can have a number of comment triggers. That's one way to get started anyway. And then you can always hop in as a real human.

7:33Mari Smith: That's a big deal. I was at VidSummit with Jason and that seems like magic sauce almost. And he was telling me he thinks it's even better than links because clearly it will allow you to say in your text post, hey, if you want this resource, comment, whatever the word is. And we'll DM it to you. And it's automated. And you and Facebook is actually and Instagram are actually, you know, doing this all for you. This actually could be quite a game changer, don't you think? I agree. I know later in the show, we're going to talk a bit about the business AI and that's it's all tied together. It's all moving towards frictionless experiences that drive sales.

8:11I mean, truly, Meta does want more and more businesses to be able to get people purchasing from their shop, from their website, potentially literally right inside the DMs. Yeah. And I didn't realize that you could do it like it's built in and it's free, but without even having to pay for another tool. but it's crazy. I was at a conference earlier this year and somebody was talking about like training the backend AI to continue the conversation after the, here's the thing you asked for. And obviously more comments almost always means more reach. So I love that. What are some of the other, like some of your favorite workarounds for people that are trying to find ways to share links that are clickable?

8:49Yeah, well, your page comes with a main action button, so you can periodically change that and different calls to actions. The other thing to remember here is that even though it's two links, those are for external third-party sites, obviously including your own, but there are exemptions. So any of MetaProperties, you could send a link to your Instagram. You could create a Facebook event and share that event. You could share links to your Facebook group. And so those are helpful things to think about. Also, I would just publish a post with your main link, your main lead magnet, your shop, your whatever it is you want people to subscribe to, pin that to the featured section.

9:25And for now, I don't think we're going to be limited to links and stories. You can you can still put links and stories. And I think that's always a great way to have that top of mind awareness. A lot of folks, too, are saying use a spoken or on screen memorable, ideally a memorable, not a big long one that people have to go and type out or QR code is another great idea, too. Yeah, that's something I've advised a long time with podcasts is, yeah, just go get a vanity URL that someone can easily retype or that they can copy and paste. And so if somebody comes to you now, right, and they're like, OK, I got to do better on Facebook.

9:58I'm willing to spend some money. You know, as you mentioned, we still have MetaVerified. We have MetaOne. We have Muse, which has paid plans. We'll talk about in a bit. We have boosting or promoting. We have obviously Facebook ads themselves. Like where would you even point somebody or maybe for a couple of different types of businesses? Where would you even start? Yeah, great question, because it really does depend on their budget and their objective. What are they trying to achieve here? I generally would dissuade anyone from signing up from MetaVerified or MetaOne, quite frankly. I've heard nothing but disappointing stories where people say even paying for it, they're not getting support.

10:33Maybe paying for the links, there's no guarantee of reach. I would rather, if you had a budget, however much that is, just pour it into boosting your, what I call your unicorns, your best performing posts. So the posts that get the best reach. Gary Vaynerchuk is always banging on about this. So you use organic to get some great test and get some feedback from the algorithm, see what's going far with followers and non followers, then throw some money on that. Whether it's the boost button or you're going, ideally, it's better to go directly inside of ads manager. I'd rather see any pretty much any business putting their funds there versus paying for one of these subscriptions.

11:06Sorry, Zuckerberg, if you're listening. Well, I don't think he's mad if the ads start working because he's going to make more that way, too. Although it does take up inventory. I guess on the meta one, it doesn't take up any of their inventory. So that's a nice feature. So we've been talking about what AI can do on the backend and let's talk about this new AI agent. This is an always on AI agent from meta called Muse, and they're positioning it as a personal AI agent for marketers and content creators designed to remember context and preferences over time. So it can provide quote, increasingly personalized assistance.

11:40Mike, I mean, you obviously host the AI Explored podcast. This is part of a new category of AI that marketers can take advantage of. Can you just kind of talk about what that is first?

11:49Mari Smith: Yeah. So this concept is known as persistent AI. So this is AI that is always accessible. It's an app that can be on your phone, on your computer. Everything just lives in the cloud and just works. And basically the idea here is imagine if ChatGPT or any AI system was able to do all sorts of complicated things. So the idea with these, and by the way, Grok bought by Grok, which is part of X, Elon Musk was the one that started this. And then all of a sudden we had Muse come out by Meta. And then we also had Dots come out by ChatGPT. And basically the way these things work is they're predominantly targeted right now at consumers and they are designed to do everything for you, make a reservation, purchase something for you.

12:40Mari Smith: Let's say you want to renew a subscription, whatever it is, you just basically open up the app, you tell it what it wants it to do and you move on with your life and it just does it. Now, what's really fascinating about obviously what Mark Zuckerberg has done is you think Mari about all this access to information that Facebook already has on us, right? They've got messenger stuff. They've got Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp. So they've got access. They already know so much about you. So coming right out of the gate, Meta has this massive advantage because there is so much information it already knows about you.

13:15Mari Smith: But the key to all of this is you need to connect all this stuff together. You need to be willing to give it permission to do things like purchase things on your behalf. You need to connect it to all these different systems that are behind the scenes. And that is effectively what this new form of AI is. So with that, back to you, Jerry, to ask Mario some questions on this. Yeah, well, and I think the big advantage here, of course, is that Muse will have better access to Facebook and Instagram than anyone else. But now that they're pushing this for business owners and marketers, like if we're already using ChatGPT or Claude, is there anything that you've seen about Muse that makes it worth paying attention to?

13:53Totally. And Mike really just summarized it, that Muse is actually built to do things end to end, right? You give a goal, it makes a plan, it opens a browser, it fills out the form, it sends the email, and it keeps working long after you've closed the app. And you get on with your life, your business, or other priorities. It only comes back to you when it needs your approval. And, of course, Met has extended it with Muse for Small Business, which plugs straight into your Facebook page, your Instagram analytics, your ad accounts, and then other tools, Shopify, QuickBooks, Klaviyo, Canva, you name it.

14:26So whereas a general AI assistant knows what you tell it, what you've been dialoguing with it, Muse can see years. You just said it there, Jerry, right? See years of your actual business data on Meta and ask, here's what's working and here's what isn't. So you got about 200 million small businesses on Meta's platforms. That's a totally different proposition, you know? It makes me wonder if this is the beginning of here's my budget, go run ads, which we've been talking about on the paid side for a while. Yes. And Zuckerberg made headlines. I want to say maybe the beginning of last year, there's all these headlines that were saying things like the death of the ad agency, because Zuckerberg said quite boldly, just wants advertisers to come along and say, here's the thing, product service that I want to advertise.

15:14here's my budget, you do the rest. Now to a lot of people, that's kind of scary. But when you think about the inordinate amount of data that already has, you can go and check your website, it can create the ads through the AI with videos and images, enhance this, that, and the other, use the advantage plus features and do all your targeting. So yeah.

15:31Mari Smith: So, so this is where it gets really interesting. This is an agent. Okay. This is known as agentic AI. And this is really important. If anybody's been listening in the AI world, they've been hearing agents are coming, agents are coming. Well, this is the extremely simple, super easy to use, ask it anything that is going to try to do it for you agent. And this is fundamentally going to shift everything for marketers. And it's really important that everybody pay attention to what I'm about to talk about. People are going to be using these agents to shop for them. Okay. And that means that they will rely on the agent to do the research, to decide the best thing and to buy it for them.

16:10Mari Smith: That fundamentally alters everything about what we do for marketing. Mari, what's your thoughts on that? I literally have that in my own notes here, Mike, that what marketers really, really need to sit with is Muse is not just a tool that you use. It is a preview of how your customers will be shopping. So if millions of people hand their agent at goal and say, hey, no, find me a gift, book me a dinner, compare these three options, then part of our marketing now has to work on an AI. So clean, you know, machine readable product information, clear pricing, solid reviews. So, you know, it still has to win over the human who told the agent what they want in the first place.

16:49But even just like in our social content and our websites, and it's like, if I come to your website, is it so clear what you offer and what I can buy? Because now you've got this little bot coming along and going, oh yeah, you want a ticket to social media marketing world? Here you go. Here's where to click. And oh, let me just buy it for you.

17:04Mari Smith: Yeah. And just a little more context here. I was just on a fly fishing trip with Michael Hyatt and 14 other entrepreneurs. Wow. And Michael is using Grok, which is an alternative to Muse. And literally he's got a device on his, on his wrist that listens to everything he says. And all he has to say is like, I'm going to make a commitment to hang out with you once a month. For example, he said to a guy, literally that thing on his wrist, which is listening to everything he said, went and communicated to his AI. And now his AI is going to remind him not only to make that commitment, but to reach out to that person, schedule the darn thing.

17:40Mari Smith: And all Michael has to do is show up. So now we're getting to an age where literally you just say it and it will do it. I mean, Jerry, what's your reaction to that? I see you smiling. Well, my first thing is I'm going to make a commitment. Is that some sort of key phrase to definitely do this? Because my big fear as a consumer and a marketer is it's just going to run off and do things that I don't want. I've been using Claude to manage my inbox. And yesterday morning, Claude said, oh, I accidentally sent seven emails, but don't worry. I sent seven more to tell people that I accidentally sent seven emails.

18:12And I was like, stop. Like you shouldn't have sent them because it's only supposed to draft.

18:16Mari Smith: I think you're going to get to the point where over time you're going to give it more autonomy and control. I would imagine right now it has to ask for confirmation between before doing things, but eventually if it gets really good. You're just going to trust it to manage your schedule and to manage everything for you. Mari, what's your reaction to this? Because this is paradigm shifting stuff, right? It's paradigm shifting. And at the moment, Meta for 20 some years, previously Facebook, right? They're one of the least trusted companies on the planet. And yet, hello, 2.8 million downloads in its first two weeks of launch on Muse, MetaMuse.

18:50And as one little you know caveat that might be um give you peace of mind is the meta said that muse will not publish content send messages or make purchases without a user's approval to be fair you know i saw some article go by was a guy put a keyboard for sale on facebook marketplace now somewhere and he used muse somewhere he must have enabled some permissions because all of a sudden a guy showed up at his door and the seller had no clue who he was but the muse gave the address and they're chatting back and forth and say, no, are available this time. This place is the keyboard still for sale.

19:23Yep. Sure. Yep. Come on over.

19:26Mari Smith: Wow. No way. So that's crazy, but that's kind of cool at the same time, because if you think about what an agent is, it's acting on your behalf. That's right. Eventually we're going to get to the point where this is going to open up all sorts of opportunities. And, you know, Mar, you did mention earlier that, Hey, this is the company known as Facebook. Jerry, I don't know if I'm stealing your thunder here, but like, Like, this sounds like a data opportunity for Meta. Does it not? Do you understand why this? Like, Meta is going to use this to be able to sell more ads to a lot more people is kind of what I'm thinking.

19:55Mari Smith: What's your reaction? Oh, absolutely. Every single micro nanoparticle that they can collect that builds these personas, these, you know, Meta knows us better than we know ourselves, unfortunately or unfortunately. But, you know, if somebody's looking, I have not tried Muse Ed. I don't have it. It's not on my docket just yet to sign up for Muse. I'm in the camp of like, we'll wait. I have it. You go for it, Mike. You boldly blaze the trail and tell us how that goes. I'm going to wait just a wee bit. But I would recommend, you know, maybe start with things like analyzing your content. That's low stakes.

20:31Analyzing your content in order to make some better decisions going forward. Go in eyes wide open, you know, some behind the scenes work, reporting, ad insights, admin. You just be thoughtful about what accounts you connect and what you let it approve. That's my big fear too, is like, I don't want to give it my credit card and tell it to go book this, buy that and whatever, or emails, send anybody some emails. We'll wait and see with all of that.

20:55Mari Smith: We've got some exciting news. We just launched a creator ticket for Social Media Marketing World. Here's what other creators had to say about the conference. I'm a constant creator. I came here to really learn about the different strategies and tools that can better my workflow and automation and to better my audience as well. This is my third year coming to the Social Media Marketing World and I love it. Every year I get to hear firsthand from creators all over the country, what they're doing, the new ways to improve things. It doesn't matter how many followers you got, whether you are new or you've been around for a while.

21:27All of these people are so friendly. You just walk up to anybody and they introduce themselves to you. This community is amazing. Like everyone's here to share. I'm excited to get back home and start creating.

21:37Mari Smith: Get tickets at socialmediamarketingworld.info. I will tell you what happened with Muse for me. At first, when I installed it, I had no idea what the heck I was going to do with it, because honestly, it's not intuitive. Like, what the heck are you going to do with this new thing? Right. So I didn't really do very much with it. And then out of the blue, it starts sending me information that thinks I would find valuable, which is actually really intriguing. And it was information that I thought was valuable. So without me even asking it, it just sent me some interesting reports that I thought I would find super useful.

22:05Mari Smith: And it must be because it was probably watching what I was posting on Facebook. So it's kind of intriguing to think eventually it's going to proactively ping you with stuff that it thinks you're interested in. That seems like an interesting, you know, who knows where this is going to go. But wow. I think everything that it does is for data. And I think this is absolutely another one of those. And when it was announced, I was like, oh, that's really intriguing. And I, you know, I follow a lot of like AI educators, people that have been on your other podcast, Mike. And for some reason, the hype seemed like not just normal AI hype.

22:37like, oh, people are genuinely enjoying this. But my reaction was the same as yours. Mario initially was like, nah, don't need it. Don't need to, you know. But I signed up last weekend because, you know, I got swept up in it. But I will tell you this. It's, I don't want to call it aggressive, but it is assertive about wanting you to connect your stuff. And it's very charming. One of the things that I noticed about it is unlike chat GPT or Claude, it will like heart your comment just like a person would in a DM. So it does these more human-like things. It's got this adorable little, you know, I don't know what it's supposed to be.

23:11Mari Smith: It's a fuzzy little character. I don't know what the heck it's called. Yeah. Yeah. And you can choose different names for it. And I intentionally, I was like, I'm not connected to anything. I opened it for one purpose, which was a marketing purpose, which was, can I get you to schedule stuff on my personal profile using AI? Because I'm already, you know, using tools to do that on other platforms. But as we know, third party tools can't schedule on personal profiles. You can on mobile. And I think sometimes it shows up on desktop and it flat out said, I can't schedule anything to which my reaction was like, well, what good are you then?

23:44But but it did come back and it said, I can actually if you tell me what you want to say and what time you want it to go up, you're not scheduling it, but I will put it up at that time. And I was like, OK, here we go. But I can't do any images and I can't do any videos. It's got to be text only. So that to me will be a big unlock, I think, if we get to the point where we can, you know, use the marketing tools we're already using and then somehow get Muse to actually, you know, help us repurpose in more ways. Let me just interject something real quick here, because I think what's this thing, two months old or something or not even?

24:18Mari Smith: It's very new. Yes. If that, yeah. This is the very tip of the iceberg. You know what's floating through my mind right now is this is eventually going to reach like massive enterprise level because this is not just connecting all the meta family of apps, right? Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, whatever threads and Messenger. It's I mentioned a few of them earlier, like Klaviyo and but also Slack, Zoom, Asana, Dropbox, Figma. It's like these are just a few of their early partners. Can you imagine when they connect with everything like your CRM, your marketing automation and Google? ecosystem. I mean, the sky's the limit.

24:55Well, it's got its own browser, so it could, and you could give it access to logins. And then next thing you know, it's your bank, you know, your credit cards. Mari just cringed for those listening to the audio podcast. Oh, buy a house for me.

25:08Mari Smith: We're going to look back on this episode like a year from now and say, wow, that thing is actually really good. Yeah. We'll be like, gosh, how queen we were talking about the very basic things. Yeah. Well, and let's be honest, you know, right now there's just three players that I'm aware of. Grok, which is part of X and Elon Musk. And then you've got GPT Dots, which is only available on their premium$100 a month plans. And then we've got Muse, which is the only one that's free, by the way. That's important. This is the way Zuckerberg does everything. It's free for a long time, just like Marketplace.

25:39Mari Smith: You know, he makes it free to try to dominate the Marketplace. Right. And if it gets wide scale adoption, which, you know, it could because think about all the distribution Facebook has. Right. Meta has this could this could quite literally take off. And then it opens up the OK, how do we be recommended by Muse? Right. How are we the product or the company that Muse and all these other agents want to recommend? And that just opens up a big old fascinating can of worms that I'm sure we'll be exploring on my other show down the road. Indeed. Yeah. Yeah. And that brings up a great point, too. You know, another one of the announcements that Meta made and what they fully rolled out was Forum, which is a dedicated smartphone app just for Facebook groups that brings all of your communities in one place.

26:25But it also has a feature called Ask, which is an AI powered tools tool that answers your questions using existing Facebook posts and comments. And so I want to go back to what you said earlier and where this conversation has gone. You know, Mari, you talked about getting the AI to recommend you. And Mike, Like you said, they're, you know, the AI is going to go buy it for people as well. And so now I'm wondering if this is another basically opportunity to get found is by, you know, being in Facebook groups. But let's come back to that in a second. Facebook groups have been around forever. Now that there's now they've got their own app, like knowing what you know, do you think groups are still growing or is this just another data grab for everything else we've been talking about?

27:05So groups are absolutely still growing. And one of the reasons to pull out and put a separate mobile app called Forum is to drive more, even more usage. And so, yeah, they're definitely still growing. I think that there's an incredible use case for businesses to have a group. The ask feature, to be fair, is really only going to surface answers from public groups. You're not going to get necessarily answers from a private unless it's anonymized. And it might be because that is a relatively new feature maybe in the last year. and I like to run private groups, but if you have a private group, any member can be shown one or more.

27:43It could be a dozen of their posts and say, hey, we want to feature this post. Now it is up to the individual user slash member of a group if you've chosen to have some of your posts featured. So somebody coming in to go, okay, do I want to join this group? They can get sneak preview and it won't give you the name or anything identifying. So my guess too is with this ask, I was over the moon about this forum thing and then the novelty wore off after about 24 hours. But I'm like, oh God, not another app. But the AI powered tool with these answers, they may well surface answers that are in those like previews, those anonymized previews.

28:21Mari Smith: You know, Mari, you remember when they had a dedicated Facebook groups app. That's right. And I was infuriated when they got rid of it and integrated it into Facebook. I'm actually really excited that it's actually coming back because, you know, we've been seeing groups not necessarily show up in the feed as much anymore. Right. Because we're seeing a lot more video show up in the feed. At least that's my thinking, you know, and I would imagine it's highly custom based on the user. But do you feel like this Facebook, what are they calling this thing? Forum. Does it remind you of what groups used to be?

28:55Mari Smith: And is there an advantage? What's your thoughts? A little and even more enhanced because, for example, right now, last time I checked anyway, there's not any ads. So it's clean. It feels fresh. It's a different layout. It has this comments are scrollable left to right instead of up and down. And there's just it's just a whole new experience. That's it's quite it's got that novelty factor, like I say. So I think for people that run relatively large slash active groups will really do well with forum because it is extracting other features like, you know, hey, here's some comments you missed or, you know, here's groups that you might want to participate in.

29:36And it's just, you know, when you're in the app, it's, you know, it's only groups.

29:40Mari Smith: You have a really big group and we have private groups, obviously, for our conference. Are you finding that you're seeing you encouraging people to download the forum app? or is this one of those things that once you go in there, everybody forgets about it and they have to have notifications on. I'm just curious what your thoughts are on that. Yeah, like I say, I was one of the first to download it and I immediately loved it. I just, it's a great app. And then within 24, 48 hours, I promptly forgot about it. A lot of people did the same thing. It's another app to open, right? It's like, oh, I got to open this one now.

30:11Yes. But here's the thing. I think, so there's a lot of people out there that only use Facebook predominantly for groups. They're not interested in much of anything else. So this really keeps them in that lane to go, OK, I don't need to mess around with a page or profile or advance or whatever. You still need a profile, of course, to get in there. But as far as a business use case, I don't know that forum necessarily has a big role to play. OK, so as we're looking at this, I'm always thinking like from a marketing standpoint, like, oh, this could this ask tool could be like a research tool. Yes.

30:43Do we think we need to be somehow monitoring our own brand and our industry? in there like a weekly or a monthly routine to go ask questions and see what comes up because obviously we don't have social monitoring tools for this as of yet that's a good question jerry and you know i don't think so i just opened the app here and it goes okay yeah that's right here's my little ask thing hi marie real people real voices you can ask it anything home theater setups on a budget when to adopt a new dog where to buy affordable clothing albums with zero bad songs. These are the prompts for the questions.

31:18Mari Smith: Do you think this could be a competitive to Reddit? You know, Reddit is, if you think about what forums are, that's what Reddit really is, right? They got all these subreddits and all this stuff. I wonder if this is a competitive salvo over to Reddit. And I also wonder whether they'll actually force people to use this app and remove groups because they did that with Messenger. Remember when they launched Messenger, they got rid of it. I do, but then they baked it back in. I strongly feel, and again, let's visit this conversation a year from now. I think the forum will end up in the cutting room floor at some point.

31:50Okay, fascinating. Could be wrong. Well, and the separate app to me is not the most interesting part. It's the ask feature, the fact that there's this aggregated ability. When we think about how bad search was, for example, on Facebook five years ago, and obviously it's gotten better and now you can just go in and ask these things. Do you think this could be even a customer research tool because I do a lot of customer research on, you know, using Reddit, getting voice of customer and things like that. And this is something, especially if they pulled anonymous data, as you said, Mari, this would be a way to scrape stuff that chat GPT and Claude can't do even on the deepest research projects.

32:26Yeah, yeah, exactly. I just, oh my God, it's giving me a very in-depth answer. I just asked a very, very basic question and it's giving me some, almost like you guys probably have seen the same tool actually sits in Instagram and in Facebook. I think it does, where you can just put a prompt in, right? It's a meta AI is what it's using, of course. And it gives you like, a bit like Google Gemini, that kind of a summary, and then some other bullet points and some sources that are linked. And in this case, if I tap on a source, it's going to take me straight to a public group. It did go to a public group.

32:59Okay. And, you know, we've spent sometime today talking about how businesses can get discovered or need to get discovered from AI so that the sale gets recommended and things like that. Is this another opportunity? Like, should we be starting our own group? Because, you know, if we're already stretched in, right, we've got our Facebook business page, maybe a personal profile, Instagram, like, does this signal to you knowing all you know about Meta that this might be a good place to invest our time going into 2027? Really great clarification. And honestly, it's completely and utterly comes down under the ROI or I would call it ROT, right?

33:32Return on time. What you're predominantly doing in groups is networking because you're not going to get there and be all like pushy and salesy. But it can be a slow burn. I'd rather recommend managing your own group for sure if you wanted to, but predominantly that's going to be top of mind awareness and top of funnel and authority, establishing authority. That's what I do with my own social scoop group. But otherwise I would put groups fairly low down on the marketing mix for the vast majority of businesses. Okay. All right. I appreciate you saying that because that's not what I thought you were going to say.

34:01And I was like, oh, now I got to think about groups again. It's work. Yes. Yes. Without question.

34:06Mari Smith: Let me ask this question, Mari. For people that are doing pop-up events and they want to have like a private group for that, could this be an application where they could pop open this app and find that? What's your reaction? Big time. Big time. I love pop-up groups. I do pop-up groups for my courses. I'm actually promoting a third-party ads training. And as part of the bonus, if they buy their ticket through my link, I'm like, I'm doing a pop-up group for, you know, like 10 days or something. So I love that. I think it's a great use case. Why don't you just explain what a pop-up group is for people that might not understand that?

34:35Yeah. Yeah. So it's basically just a limited time. As you start the group for a very specific purpose, it's open for a finite amount of time and for a finite purpose. And it's very clear when people are joining it, that is the purpose. Generally, it's not public. It would be private. So in generally it's only, you know, you have to answer a specific question to get in the group, or if it's for a paid program, for sure, then they pop their email and they use to buy the ticket or whatever it is. So, yeah.

35:00Mari Smith: And this is where the application could be useful because if they're not active on Facebook and they download Forum and this is the only group that they maybe turn on notifications for, then all of a sudden this becomes a really valuable add-on to a paid program. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, I agree. I agree. Although I'm almost positive you do need a Facebook account to access Forum. It's not like a completely - No, no, no. But, but, but instead of getting notifications from every darn thing, you see what I'm saying? Like here, you use this almost like a dedicated app for the experience.

35:33Mari Smith: Yeah. And you probably have the ability to turn on notifications for this particular group. And that way you'd get pinged to come back in there and probably have the kind of engagement you're hoping for. That might be an application here. It could well be like, I know you moved your society off of Facebook and into heartbeat. I use Mighty Networks for, I use them both. I still have my Facebook group for general purpose. And then I have my Mighty Networks when I'm doing a course that I want a community to go with the course. But even for social media marketing world, we still use Facebook groups.

36:04Mari Smith: So, and we have custom groups, you know, just for speakers and stuff like that. This could be an interesting possible application where they don't have to be worried, worried about anything else if they can set notifications at a group level inside forum. So there's some possible application there. That's a good point, Mike, when you're getting people to join the groups for the for the world and just by the way download the forum app yeah exactly yeah well and i'm wondering if that group you know that you have for the conference that we have for the conference every year should be because i think you can make a group public but you have to be a member to post and so i'm just wondering like would that help people who ask muse questions for example about social media marketing world or ask questions in the i don't remember exactly if if anybody can join if it is public or or not because obviously you don't want No, it's private, but I'm under the impression that any group could be available inside of forums, right?

36:55Mari Smith: Or is it only? Correct. Yeah. Any group. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's just the, it sounds like the public ones are the ones that get scraped for answers with all of this. So, well, let's be honest. I think AI is reading everything. Of course it is. And even private encrypted DMs. Yeah. I think so too. If it keeps people opening the app more often, I think it's absolutely doing that. And now, of course, Meta AI wants to engage with our customers and clients. They've been rolling out some new features to handle more of these tasks. So there's messenger agents powered by Meta AI called Meta Business Agents.

37:27Now they've added appointment booking directly in Facebook lead ads. Basically, you get to the thank you page and includes a calendar widget, which works with Calendly and HubSpot and HighLevel. You know, they're testing direct checkout inside AI powered conversations with PayPal and Shopify and Stripe. So even if somebody doesn't sign up for Muse, as you said, Mike, all of this stuff is here and in some way. Now, obviously, if sales go way up, I feel like Meta AI, you can talk to whoever you want. But have you engaged with any of these messenger agents that are powered by Meta AI? And I mean, what's the experience like?

38:00I was doing a lot of research in preparation for this particular topic, because if you Google like which, you know, examples of Facebook pages or brands that are using these Meta business agents. and there's all these major brands. And yet I just was poking around and I was testing, okay, I'm going to do some real-time testing here. And I couldn't get anybody to respond like KLM Airlines and Levi Strauss and like Makeup, Sephora. And I'm like, has anybody got these things turned on? But what I discovered is a lot of the meta business agents are working predominantly in ads. And if we just wind the clock back a little bit, what strikes me is how far we've come because guys remember back in the day with the messenger bot era, like 2017, 2018, everything was very rigid, like almost like the phone trees, right?

38:46You don't want to get caught in that. If you do anything off script, then the bot fell apart. But now these new agents are much more human-like. And a minute ago, Jerry, you were saying like how Muse is that real, like it's heart in your comment or something. And I think that that's the thing with the meta business agents is that it can really act human-like, answering obviously questions, recommending products, asking qualifying questions, and like you said, booking the appointment right there in the DM thread. So the test use is simple to say, no, did I feel helped or did I feel handled from a consumer standpoint?

39:24Is this a potential solution to the, you know, another one to the, you know, the challenge to share links? I mean, this kind of fits into all of that, right? Letting meta book appointments and things like that? It does. You're right. You're right. And And that is hugely what meta, the whole meta ecosystem. I remember, gosh, you guys might remember this a long time ago now that Zuckerberg would bandy about this word interoperability. And that was where they were baking all the DM systems, whether it was WhatsApp, Instagram direct or Facebook messenger. And now I think you can DM on threads too, but it's like wherever the customer first sees your information publicly, and then maybe they're messaging you that it's all a completely part of the same ecosystem.

40:04And especially if you're a brand or a business that you're predominantly wanting to deploy a business agent or met a business agent to interact, to basically warm up a prospect and ultimately get them to a buying decision while still feeling helped. Like I say, not handled. So it's not that people, you know, people don't hate automation. They hate feeling trapped. and they don't have a choice. Like for me, I was always my favorite button when I did, I used Manichat for a while and I would be like that little button, talk to a human and people like tip top and that thing like crazy. Just give me a human.

40:44But now we've come a long way. Yeah, and that's well put. Like if I love talking to AI help bots and not feeling like I'm bothering somebody and getting the help that I need. But the purchasing thing that we talked about, that's the part where I'm still like, yeah, I don't know if I'm quite there yet, but maybe a year from now, we'll listen back to this and go, I remember when we were concerned about that. You know, it's interesting, Jerry, just to plus what you said is some parts of the world buying in a chat is absolutely how commerce works. Look at WhatsApp and anywhere outside North America.

41:15It's like North America here. We're finally catching up, you know. So I think that comfort is going to follow a familiar checkout like ShopPay or PayPal, clear return policies and a conversation that felt genuinely helpful before the buy button showed up. So they're not being like sold to anything impulse and low ticket, easy peasy in the chat. But you know, if you're selling a$5 ,000 coaching program, people are going to want to feel that human relationship behind it. Yeah, without question. So do you ever think about like, because obviously we're talking about how quickly all of this is moving, both for consumers and marketers, do you ever fantasize about what marketing will be like for you in the future, when you can just turn over the stuff you don't enjoy and keep the parts that you do?

41:56Like if you got to plan it, where would we be a year from now? I'm going to give you a completely polar opposite answer to that question. I was literally talking to one of my VIP consulting clients yesterday and I said, she was saying to me, she just really was finding social media to be a drag. And I said, you know what? I wish we could just wind the clock back 20 years before social media even existed. Sometimes it's the bane of our lives. I don't have to show up regularly, I have to do content. It can be a full-time job but yeah i think that the content creation and like you mentioned jerry earlier about like ideation and scheduling so long as you get final approval and it still sounds truly like your authentic voice then that's that's an aspect of it and certainly no data analytics and all this mining of the data to go hey marie you know last year and this time you posted about this topic and it was your best post all year do you want to do that again oh yeah go for it sure yeah Yeah, that's a nice nudge.

42:54So of all the stuff we've talked about today, forum and Facebook groups and automations and AI and Muse and, you know, all of this, like if a business owner or marketer is listening right now, which one would you consider advising them to experiment first? And which one would you say not worry about yet? I mean, you might not worry too much about Muse yet. And of course, it's not widely available in the whole world yet in its early days. But as and when you do get access to Muse, I would start with the boring, high ROI stuff, right? Running a lead ad and turning on the book time option, if that's part of your business model, trying the meta AI business assistant in ads manager and getting some reporting and insights.

43:31It's low risk, right? But yeah, I wouldn't lose sleep over things like we just talked about buying in chat, like the in chat checkout, unless you're a major, major brand listening to this and you probably got early access. But for me, honestly, Jerry and Mike, the biggest experiment always is this human one. Before you automate a single conversation, ask yourself what your customers feel when they talk to you today. Automate the answers and never the care. Love it. This has been a fascinating conversation, Mari. Thank you so much for being with us today. If people want to learn more about you or explore working with you, where do you want to send them?

44:05Sure. Just marismith.com or on social anywhere is pretty much Mari Smith.

44:09Mari Smith: Mari and Jerry, thank you so much for being on the show today. And hey, folks, if you missed anything we just talked about, you can get all the notes over at socialmediaexaminer.com slash 744. If you're new to the show, follow us. If you've been a listener for a while, we would love a review. And do check out my other show, the AI Explored podcast. This brings us to the end of the social media marketing podcast. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner, with my co-host today, Jerry Potter. I'll be back with you next week. I hope you make the best out of your day and may your marketing keep evolving. The Social Media Marketing Podcast is a production of Social Media Examiner.

44:47Mari Smith: Before you go, Social Media Marketing World has a creator track taught by creators like Daryl Eves, Adley Kinsman, Maria Wendt, and Sean Cannell. Whether you create or hire creators, you'll learn how they grow their audiences and you'll get to meet them in person. April 1st through 3rd in Anaheim, grab your tickets at socialmediamarketingworld.info.