Facebook makes it easy to share all kinds of content with your friends, family, and connections on the platform. Whether you want to share a status update, photos, videos, or links, Facebook provides various options for seamlessly sharing your posts. In just a few clicks, you can broadcast content to everyone in your network.
Share a Status Update
The quickest way to share something on Facebook is to write a status update. A status update is a short text post that will appear in your friends’ News Feeds and on your profile page. Status updates are a great way to express what’s on your mind, give your friends a life update, or share quick thoughts and musings.
Here is how to share a status update:
- Go to Facebook.com or open the Facebook app on your phone or tablet.
- Click in the text box at the top of your News Feed or timeline that says “What’s on your mind?”
- Type your update into the text box. Status updates can be up to 63,206 characters or about 1000 words.
- Click the “Post” button. Your status update will now appear in your friends’ News Feeds and on your profile page.
Your Facebook friends will be able to interact with your status update by liking, commenting, and sharing it with their own networks. Status updates are shared publicly by default, but you can limit your audience for a status update by clicking on the audience selector tool beside the Post button.
Share Photos and Videos
Images and videos tend to gain high engagement on Facebook, so photos and video clips are great content to share. You can share photos and videos you’ve taken yourself or any content you discover online. Here’s how to easily share photos and videos from your computer or mobile device:
Share Photos
- Click Photo/Video in the status update box or go to your profile and click Photo/Video > Create Photo Album.
- Select up to 20 photos to share from your computer or mobile device’s photo library.
- Enter a caption or description of the photos.
- Adjust privacy settings and tag people if desired.
- Click Post or Publish.
Share Videos
- Click Photo/Video in the status update box or go to your profile and click Photo/Video > Create Photo Album.
- Select a video file from your computer or mobile device’s library.
- Enter a caption or description of the video.
- Adjust privacy settings and tag people if desired.
- Click Post or Publish.
The photos and videos you share will appear in your friends’ News Feeds and on your profile page. Friends can interact by liking, commenting, and sharing your visual posts.
Share Links
Sharing links on Facebook allows you to share content from other websites with your network. This is a great way to share news articles, blog posts, YouTube videos, fun quizzes, interesting infographics, and more. To share a link:
- Copy and paste the URL of the content you want to share into the status update box.
- Facebook will automatically pull content from the webpage to create a preview with a headline, text snippet, and image.
- Customize the content by adding your own text, emoji reactions, tagged people, location, or other details.
- Adjust audience settings if desired.
- Click Post and the content will now appear in your friends’ News Feeds.
The preview that Facebook generates encourages people to click and engage with the full content on the original site. Links shared on Facebook can help content go viral and gain more exposure.
Cross-Post Between Facebook Accounts
If you manage multiple Facebook accounts such as professional and personal profiles, you may want to share the same content across each one. Fortunately, cross-posting to multiple Facebook accounts is easy to do.
Here are two options for cross-posting:
Use a Social Media Management Tool
Social media management tools like Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and Buffer allow you to connect multiple social media accounts and schedule posts to go out to different profiles. After composing an update in one of these tools, you can simply check off each Facebook account you want to cross-post to.
Use the “Share” Button
When logged into one Facebook account, find a post you want to share and click the Share button. Then switch accounts without closing the window and go to your other profile. The post you want to cross-post will still be available to share to the new account.
This manual method works for sharing any type of content including status updates, links, photos, and videos. The same post will now appear across each of your Facebook accounts.
Share to Facebook Stories
Facebook Stories allow you to share photo and video content that disappears after 24 hours. Stories appear as circles at the top of the News Feed. You can easily cross-post status updates, links, images, and videos to Facebook Stories in addition to your regular feed.
To share an existing post to your Facebook Story:
- Click the three dots in the top right corner of the post.
- Select “Share to Story” from the dropdown menu.
- Click “Share Now.”
To create an original Story:
- Go to the Stories section at the top of News Feed.
- Click the “+” icon to create a new story.
- Add photos/videos or use Facebook Camera to capture original content.
- Apply filters, drawings, stickers, locations, and other creative elements.
- Click “Your Story” to share it.
Share to a Facebook Group
Facebook Groups make it easy to share content with certain audiences and communities. There are groups for all types of niches, topics and interests. Once you’ve joined relevant groups, you can easily share status updates, links, images, videos, and documents:
- Go to the group page and click Write Post at the top.
- Create your post with text, images, videos, polls, or files.
- Click Post in Group.
Your content will now be shared with all members of the group. This allows you to segment the audience for your posts rather than sharing it publicly to all friends.
Share to a Facebook Page
If you manage a Facebook Page for a business, brand, organization, or public figure, you can share content specifically to that Page’s followers rather than your personal profile. To share to a Facebook Page:
- Go to the Page and click Publish at the top.
- Compose your post with text, images, video, live video, polls, or documents.
- Click Publish.
Content shared to a Facebook Page will appear in the News Feeds of all people who have liked or followed that Page. This allows you to share relevant updates with your target audience.
Adjust Privacy Settings
By default, posts shared on your personal profile are visible to all of your Facebook friends. However, you can restrict the audience for your posts and only share them with certain connections.
To customize privacy settings for your posts:
- Click the audience selector tool next to the Post button when composing your post.
- Choose from the available options: Public, Friends, Family, Friends except…, Specific friends, or Only Me.
- Click Confirm to apply the customized audience.
You can create friend lists and family lists to make it easier to share with segmented audiences. Privacy settings give you control over who can see your Facebook activity.
| Privacy Option | Description |
|---|---|
| Public | Anyone on or off Facebook |
| Friends | Your Facebook friends |
| Family | Only people in your designated family list |
| Friends except… | All friends except people on a custom list |
| Specific friends | Individual friends chosen each time |
| Only me | Just yourself |
Share Faster with Keyboard Shortcuts
For quick sharing on desktop, Facebook offers handy keyboard shortcuts. Instead of clicking through menus, shortcuts speed up the process of sharing to your profile, Story, groups, and more. These are the top Facebook share shortcuts:
- Status Update: Ctrl + Shift + U
- Photo/Video: Ctrl + Shift + P
- Feeling/Activity: Ctrl + Shift + F
- Live Video: Ctrl + Shift + L
- Story: Ctrl + Shift + S
Mastering Facebook’s keyboard shortcuts allows you to swiftly share in seconds. Give them a try!
Embed Posts on External Sites
You can embed public Facebook posts on external websites outside of Facebook. This allows you to display social content from your Facebook feed on your blog, website, or other web pages.
To get the embed code for a Facebook post:
- Click the three dots in the upper right corner of the post.
- Select “Embed Post” from the dropdown menu.
- Copy the generated embed code.
- Paste the code into your website HTML where you want the post to display.
Embedded posts showcase your Facebook content and enable new forms of sharing. Visitors can also interact with embedded posts by liking, sharing, and commenting.
Use Facebook Share Buttons
Websites and blogs can add Facebook share buttons to make it easy for visitors to share content. Share buttons appear as icons that visitors can click to share the page to their own Facebook profile, groups, or pages.
As a website owner, you can customize and generate Facebook share button code from developers.facebook.com. Just copy and paste the code anywhere you want buttons to appear. Common placement is above, beside, or below articles.
Facebook share buttons increase engagement, traffic, and visibility for websites. Visitors enjoy being able to easily share content to their networks.
Turn Off Platform Sharing
If you connect your Facebook account to third-party apps, games, or websites, they may automatically share your activity back to Facebook without any action needed from you. This is known as platform sharing.
You can control what gets shared from connected platforms within your Facebook settings:
- Go to Settings & Privacy > Settings > Apps and Websites.
- Click “Apps, Websites and Plugins.”
- Find the platform and toggle sharing on or off.
Disabling platform sharing means your activities on those third-party services won’t automatically post to your Facebook feed unless you manually share it.
Avoid Oversharing
While sharing on Facebook has many benefits, it’s also important to avoid oversharing or posting too many trivial updates. Frequent status updates may cause some people to tune you out.
Aim for quality over quantity in your sharing. Post your most important updates and engaging content, but give friends a break from any repetitive or excessive posts.
Also be cautious about oversharing personal details, rants, inappropriate content, and other posts that may reflect poorly on you or hurt someone.
Review News Feed Sharing Settings
You can customize News Feed settings to control the types of posts you see from friends, groups, and pages. Use these settings to improve your News Feed experience:
- Prioritize who to see first
- Unfollow people and groups
- Snooze people and groups for 30 days
- Reconnect with people and groups you unfollowed
Reducing noisy or irrelevant shares can help highlight the Facebook content you care most about. Manage your preferences under News Feed Preferences in Settings.
Conclusion
Facebook provides diverse options for easily sharing all types of content to your friends, family, connections, groups, and pages. Whether sharing personal life updates, news articles, viral videos, or business content, you can broadcast information seamlessly to your target audiences on Facebook.
Leverage built-in sharing tools, privacy settings, keyboard shortcuts, advanced options like cross-posting and embedding, and best practices like avoiding oversharing. With Facebook’s immense reach, sharing your posts can help you stay connected, express yourself, entertain others, and spread information far and wide.