Facebook Help (hope that’s ok)

There used to be a tech support forum on changstar. I tried posting this on reddit but it was deleted because my account is too new. Not sure I’ll ever have enough karma or days.

But this place is full of kind, tech savvy people. Hopefully you don’t mind. I don’t know anyone else to ask.

I recently posted an important 7000 ish character post to my Facebook advocacy page (it’s a fan page not a personal page) which included 4 different links to add optional extra information to readers. When I posted it Facebook randomly chose one of the links to "highlight" at the bottom of the page with an image it grabbed from the page the link went to. Kind of annoying because I didn’t want the post to have that image.

But the real problem is that when people shared the post, Facebook just shared the link it randomly chose, not the whole post. None of my writing or other links got shared. I didn’t even realize this was happening until someone told me in the comments. So I added some text asking people to copy and paste the rest of the post if they shared it which only some people did of course.

It was kind of a disaster because the whole point of this post was to be shared to spread awareness. It was also my most popular post to date.

So I’m hoping someone can tell me how to post text with links so that the whole post is shared.

I’ve been told to add an image to the post but I can’t do that every time.

Thanks for any advice!

 

I really don't know if this is possible. Facebook will focus on the link since for the most part people want to see the link.

 

But there’s so many cases where the text is more or just as important. I can’t believe it’s that automated and restricting.

 

Welcome to Social Media. Links are more clickable than text.

 

I hate social media. I have no personal social media accounts I don’t understand the urge. But they’re really good for causes.

 

*hug*, I know @rhythmdevils

I only use it for news if I have to be honest.

 

I'd say, make your readers work a bit : break down the links
( www .superbestaudiofriends .org /index.php?threads/facebook-help-hope-that’s-ok.9291/ )
so that they are no more recognized by fb, but they (your readers) can still copy/paste/edit them easily
(yeah I know... might be too much work for many )

 

Yeah people won’t do all that work. A lot of people probably won’t even click on the links.

 

Not huge expert on FB, but will try to share what I do. (I'm using new design of Facebook, not sure how exactly it was with previous version)

1. When you copy in link into post, to me FB shows preview of which link will be showed attached to the post. And on that preview should be small X icon, that gets rid of this. If you have multiple links, I think they will show up one after another until you close them all. Then it would be posted without link.

2. If number 1 doesn't work, you can force FB to post image instead (as images should have higher priority than links). For this you can simply take screenshot of your text and post it there. Not ideal, but better than to have there random link you don't like.

3. If I have few links in one post and want to pick which one will be shown by Facebook, it seems it always picks which link you copied into post as last one (no matter which position in text was it). So I just cut-paste the main link and then it shows up as the main linked page.

 

Your post literally made zero sense to me. But it made sense to my sister who’s helping out with the Facebook page. We delete the image that Facebook creates for the link and then there is no featured link and Facebook shares the whole post like any sane social media network would. Or we post an image with the post then it shares the text with the image. Even though it just calls the post an image. “So and so and a million others liked your image”. Uhhh they liked what I wrote but whatever makes you happy facefuck. It really seems to be designed to be exclusive to idiotic new moms who only post baby pictures. Not sure I understand why they can’t figure things out better.

my sister said others she got advice from said the same thing you did. So thank you!

 

Oh, so what I'd do is actually write the article on my own website (it's still WIP but I do have one), with all of the links, the formatting, the doodads, etc... and then on Facebook, I'll just literally write something like:

"FYI... <insert link to my website>"

Short and concise. I think I only did that once in the past 18 months, though... but that's how I got around the multi-link, multi-reference restriction.

 

Happy to help.