Understanding the Share Button: Part 3 of Facebooking for Activists

Note: This post is part 3 in the “Facebooking for Activist” series. Learn how to make Facebook lists here and how to suggest Pages to your friends here.

Next to “suggesting to friends,” the share button is the easiest and most effective way to share information from Pages or other profiles with your Facebook friends. When you share a story on Facebook, that story appears in your friends’ newsfeed and on your Facebook profile.

Using the Share button

The most frequent use for the “Share” button on Facebook is on Page posts. It’s important to note here that when you share a Facebook post, you are sharing the content or link and the Page where it came from, but not any introductory text the Page had included with the post. This also means that you can’t share status updates. Note the two screenshots below. The first is a Page post and the second is a status update:

When you decide to share a post, you will have the option of sending the post as a link in a personal message or posting it on your profile and your friends’ newsfeed.  There are benefits to both of these methods, but one benefit to posting to your profile is that many more people on Facebook will see the post. The screenshot below shows where to click to switch between the two options. Once you’ve picked your method, choose whether to add a personal message, and click Share.

If you opted to share the message, your post will appear on your profile and in your friends’ newsfeed. However, remember the lists we made in the first section of this series? This is where these come in because instead of sharing the message with all of your friends, you have the option of sharing only with certain people or specific lists. To do that, instead of clicking “share”, select the lock symbol just next to the share button. A box will drop down. Select customize to use lists.

When you select customize, the box below will pop up.

To use your list, click on the drop down box that says “Only Friends” and select “Specific People.” Then type the name of the list you made in the box. In this example, the name of my list is “Conservative NC Politics.”

Once you are done selecting your list, click “save setting.” You will know that you added your list properly because when you click on the lock image, the drop down box will now look like this:

That’s it! Now just click share and you are done!

Conclusion

This wraps up our series on Facebooking for Activists. Campaign season is heating up and there are a lot of good, conservative candidates who need your help to spread their message. Pick a few in your area and start sharing their posts, notes, and links and be sure to suggest their Pages to your friends!