HOW DO WE BREAK UP WITH META?

Meta One, huh? The Meta subscription thing, where you pay a monthly fee. It’s not available for everyone yet, but some people are starting to see it: you have to pay Meta a monthly subscription to include links in your posts and in your reels. Supposedly they’re also starting to delink the links people put in comments. It’s only a matter of time before they come for the link in bio.

So what do we do? If you rely on Instagram, if you rely on Facebook, if all of that is the driver to the things that you do, if that’s the only way to get the word out, what do you do if you don’t want to pay $8 a month or $20 a month for two or four or five links?

The best time to have gotten away from these platforms was five years ago, three, two. The second best time is now.

More and more we’re hearing people get off of social media. You probably know people in your life who say, “I took Instagram off my phone. I haven’t logged into Facebook in years.”

But how do you “reach people” without social media?

Have you considered buying a billboard on the highway? Don’t laugh, it’s just one idea out of a million ways you could find your people, whether it’s clients or customers or fans. Have you considered buying a billboard on a bus bench? Have you printed out your poetry and left it places? Have you made flyers for coffee shops? Have you taken the creativity you already have and put it into the local marketing you could be doing?

Or have you worked with your people? Getting awareness off your own plate?

We so often think, “Well, yeah, but I need more reach outside of my area.” Well, I bet you know and talk to people all over the world on the internet, right? What if you made flyers for them and gave them to hand out to people, or hang up places, or talk about?

What if you went on podcasts and did an interview talking about the work you do with their 1,000 listeners at a time? What if you went on people’s YouTube channels and talked about the cool stuff you do?

You just need to talk to cool people doing cool stuff, and then people can find you from that.

Or you could pay Meta $20. And you know what? It’s $20 now. A year from now it’ll be $25. It’s going to keep going up, and it’ll never get easier to reach your fans on social media than it is today.