3 Facebook Mistakes You've Probably Made (& How to Fix Them)

  Facebook (and social media in general) is an ever-changing landscape. From the profile to the Timeline, the home page to the news feed, it's hard to keep it all straight.

Lately, I've noticed a few things going on that I wish I could help people with. A lot of it is due to privacy settings - something that's important to everyone. Here are a couple things to help you get your posts seen.

If you don't care about making sure your Facebook posts are seen by your friends, then stop reading. But I mean, isn't the whole point of posting things on Facebook for the posts to be seen? :)

Sharing Your Friends’ Posts

Sharing a post on Facebook is like the ultimate social media compliment. It’s Facebook’s highest level of engagement currency, followed by comments and then likes. Sharing is caring, as they say. And I mean, how can you resist sharing another funny cat video?

Look, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with sharing stuff on Facebook. Like I said, it’s the ultimate Facebook currency. But here’s the problem: your friend most likely has their privacy set to “friends” level only. (This applies to personal profiles only - NOT business pages that you “like” instead of “add as a friend.”) If you share their post, the only people who will see this post are your mutual friends of the person whose post you shared.

If you’re tagged in the post, they likely have it set on “friends + friends of those tagged.” This will work just fine if you'd like to share it.

Not the worst thing in the world, I get it. But if you’re trying to share this post with a whole new audience (your friends), you aren’t. Sad day.

The only caveat to this one is links. If you share a link, the link will go to all of your Facebook friends. The only thing that won’t is any caption your friend had written. If you want to include the caption, you’ll need to copy & paste it into the new update.

Ok, so how do you fix this?

It depends. If it’s a photo, you can save the photo yourself, copy & paste the caption, and then upload it as a new status. If it’s a video, well, IDK. If it’s a viral video that they’ve shared from a public page, share it directly from the page instead of from your friend’s profile. If it’s a personal video they uploaded, you can still share it, but it will only go to your mutual friends.

Sharing a Post to Win a Contest

Ok, this one is a little tricky. But here goes.

First of all, if a page asks you to “comment and share” to win, they’re technically violating Facebook’s terms of service. A page cannot ask you to “share” to count as a contest entry. But I see this all the time, so Facebook must not really care about this.

But the bigger issue here is due to your likely privacy settings. If you generally keep your posts set to “friends” level, the page has NO WAY of knowing that you shared it. Once, I messaged a company asking them how they would see who shared it (due to privacy settings) in order to choose a winner. They replied with, “We have a pages app that tells us who shared it.” LOL. No you don’t. I do this for a living, and I can’t tell you how many times my colleagues have shared our company’s posts, and it does not show up on my end because of their privacy settings. (And yes, I also have the official Facebook Pages app, and no, it does not show you all shares.)

The only way around this is if you have your post set to public. So there you go, if you want a better chance at winning stuff, set your contest posts to public. But this one is a pet peeve of mine mainly because I’m a rule follower, and I know they’re all breaking Facebook’s rules. :)

Not Using the Notifications Feature on Posts

This one is exciting. It was like a whole new world to me when I figured it out.

Picture this: someone’s just gotten engaged. Or had a baby. Or announced their pregnancy. Yay! You want to wish them well with a comment.

Stop.

Do you know how many notifications you’re going to get from other people commenting after you?? What a nightmare! If you’re anything like me, you’ve only “liked” a post because you don’t want the million notifications of the entire world commenting one word (congrats) after you.

But wait!

You can change the notifications of individual posts. Yes, individual posts. Right there in the news feed.

Up in the right hand corner of every post, there’s a little drop down arrow. When you click that, you can choose the option for “turn off notifications for this post.”

It’s a miracle!

This feature can also be turned on. Let’s say someone asks a question you are also interested in. I see many people comment “following” or “bump” so that they receive a notification when someone comments after them (hoping they too will see the answer). Instead of commenting, you can simply click “turn on notifications for this post.” Yay! You’ll now receive an alert every time someone comments on this post, and you didn’t have to do the lemming “following” comment.

So there you have it, my friends. A little more insight into the great big world of social media. I hope this post was helpful for you. Now go forth - like, comment, and share. But only if your privacy setting is correct.

xo