Question from Billie: Rick, I’ve had several of my friends tell me they can’t share my posts because they don’t have “Share” buttons on them.
Apparently this has just started happening because people used to share my stuff all the time.
Is there a setting that I need to change or something? I really need to get this fixed ASAP.
Thanks in advance for your help.
Rick’s answer: Your friends are right, Billie. Facebook no longer displays the “Share” button on posts that have their privacy levels set to “Friends”.
Their reasoning is if you have a post set to “Friends” there’s no need for your friends to share it since your friends will see it anyway – and people who aren’t your friends won’t be allowed allowed to see it at all.
The only problem with this is Facebook greatly limits the number of friends who can see your posts.
In fact, any friend who doesn’t regularly interact with your posts by liking them, commenting on them and sharing them will stop seeing your posts in their newsfeeds after a while.
Unfortunately, there’s no way to force the “Share” button to appear on posts that you mark as “Friends. That’s just the way it is now.
But that being said, if you really want as many Facebook users as possible to see a given post you can always change its privacy level to “Public”.
Setting a post to “Public” will do two things:
1 – Cause the “Share” button to be displayed on the post.
2 – Allow anyone on Facebook to see the post (as long as you aren’t blocking them, or vice versa).
Bottom line: Facebook has made several major changes that limit the way your posts can be shared and viewed by other members of the Facebook community.
As always, I’ll do my very best to keep you updated on all the new changes that will surely be coming down the pike in the future.
In the meantime, if you want a given post to have the “Share” button displayed on it you’ll have to set that post’s privacy level to “Public”.
I hope this helps, Billie. Good luck!
Update from Billie: Not what I wanted to hear, Rick. But thanks for the clear and thorough explanation.