Facebook Share Button

There are two basic understandings of a Facebook share button: 1) A button that lives on your website, making it easy for visitors to share to Facebook and share your content with just one click; and 2) A Facebook feature that allows Facebook users to share another Facebook user’s existing post.

With ShareThis, enabling a Facebook share button on your website is as easy as choosing your style, then plugging the custom share button code into your site.

If we’re talking about sharing a post, photo, article, or other media from within Facebook itself – as in, you see a friend’s post and want to share it, but can’t – then the answer comes down to your friend’s privacy settings.

Bottom line: If your friend has their privacy set to “Friends” only, then only their friends (not friends-of-friends) can see those posts; you can’t share because, by sharing, you would extend that post to your friends – in other words, beyond the limits of what the original poster’s privacy settings allow.

Within the boundaries of Facebook, the only thing required to enable sharing is a tweak of your privacy settings: Make your posts public (or, at the very least, shareable to friends-of-friends), and your posts will be shareable within Facebook. That said, if someone else has shared your website, a blog post, or other media from your site, there’s nothing you can do to enable further sharing; sharing is always tied to the privacy settings of the original poster.

When you want to share a website, blog post, or other URL on Facebook, the easiest way is via a Facebook share button, which allows you to share to Facebook in just one click. On a site that has enabled the Facebook share button, you’ll see the Facebook logo box (usually blue) floating below or to the left of the page; just click that button, and you can immediately share via your logged-in Facebook profile.

If a website has not enabled Facebook sharing, then it’s a bit more complicated:

1.     Copy the URL of the page you’d like to share;

2.     Navigate to Facebook in a separate tab;

3.     Paste the URL into the Facebook status box;

4.     Wait for the URL preview (photo + summary) to show; then

5.     Delete the URL (the preview will remain); and

6.     Write your comments in the status box.

Enabling the Facebook share button is one of the easiest things you can do to increase website shares. Once enabled, visitors to your website or blog will be able to share your website with just one click. With the ShareThis Facebook share button, you may select either inline share buttons – placed at a specific location (ex. below an article headline) – or sticky share buttons, which are fixed to the side of the screen. Either way, they are readily visible and easy for visitors to use.