There are several popular forms of engagement and interaction on Facebook.
Sharing a post means adding it to your own profile, with the ability to input your own caption without taking away any of the existing content.
For example, if you choose to share a post that features photos and a caption from the poster, the version of the post that appears on your profile will have all the same information as the original post but with an added caption at the top from you.
When another user shares your post, they essentially widen its reach and visibility to their own friends and networks.
So, how can you see who shared your post – and perhaps more importantly, is there a way that you can control who can share your post?
Who Shared Your Post?
You will know if your post has been shared by another user, because when you navigate to that post you will see ‘1 Share’ (or more) next to the comments stats.
Clicking through to the post itself will open the comments in full and will show a clickable heading letting you know how many shares there are on the post. Tap on this heading to see who shared the post and to see what caption they chose to add to the post.
How to Control and Manage Post Shares
The privacy settings that you place on your posts will directly influence who is able to share them.
If your post is public then it can be shared by anyone – however, if your post is limited to friends only then it will not be able to be shared. The most a user can do if they want to share a private post is copy a link to the post and send it to other friends who have full visibility over the poster’s own profile. They could also screenshot the original post, though this goes against community standards and will likely be reported as a violation against other users’ privacy and copyright.
The best way to manage these privacy settings is to consider visibility whenever you share a new post.
When you click on the ‘What’s on Your Mind’ text box to start a new post, make changing the privacy settings the first thing you do. Simply on the blue dropdown button under your name to set the privacy to ‘Friends’, ‘Public’, ‘Specific Friends’ or ‘Only Me’ (the latter prevents anyone from seeing the post).
We hope this helps. Sharing posts is a great way of maximising exposure and visibility and can make announcements more widely accessible to a broader audience. Having said that, knowing how to manage visibility and shares is an important part of maintaining your privacy on Facebook – with this article covering all bases.
