Having your content shared by other users is one of the best ways of establishing a presence on Facebook and growing your community.
Not only does it get a specific piece of content seen by a larger audience, but it broadens the reach of your profile – something that businesses and creators are both often keen to do on Facebook. But what about when you don’t want your content to be shared by others?
Let’s take a closer look at why this could be the case, and how to navigate it…
Why Might You Turn off Sharing?
When you limit the ability of other users to share your posts and updates on Facebook, you protect your content, and the information shared within that content.
It could be that you want to limit the spread of more personal content or stop other users from sharing and passing off your content as their own.
Whatever your reasoning, turning off or limiting the ability of other users to share content is an important part of your own online privacy.
A Guide to Stop Users From Sharing Your Content
There are various options within your Settings and Privacy menu that prevent the sharing of your posts on friends’ stories.
Heading into your ‘Settings’ menu, you’ll find a series of options dedicated to your own privacy and the visibility of your posts. Clicking on ‘Profile and Tagging’ will give you control over an option to ‘Allow Others to Share Your Posts to Their Story’. Turn this toggle off to prevent sharing and to limit the visibility and spread of your content.
Who Can See Your Posts?
The visibility of each post that you share can be tailored during the creative process.
Once you’ve created your post, you can change the visibility of it to make it public, accessible only to your friends, choose an audience of specific friends, or block specific users from seeing the post.
When you set the visibility to Friends only, the post cannot be shared by other users to their own profiles – as their network stretches beyond your ‘Friends Only’ filter. By this theory, only posts that you set to ‘Public’ visibility can be shared by other users. All other posts will not offer the share option.
This means that, arguably the best way to turn off sharing on Facebook is to limit the visibility and avoid that ‘Public’ setting.
We hope this helps. Privacy is an important part of the Facebook user experience and should be properly controlled by each user to ensure that they are happy with the visibility of their content.
