Track Your Own Post-Sharing-Activity to Facebook Groups

Facebook is a great place to stay in touch with friends and keep them up to date of what you’re about, be it finding a great motorcycle shop, sharing great places to see or just let them know you dropped your bike in the sand that you love so much.

Why share your posts to Facebook groups?

Facebook also has a lot of useful groups for your type of travelling to get information, help and inspiration. I also like to share my posts from my own timeline or facebook page to some of those groups to let others know about the positive or negative experiences I have made. Be aware though that some groups do not want you to share posts from your page or from your blog, so please always read the group rules first.

On my journey I discovered a lot of useful motorcycle travel groups where I once in a while like to share my posts, be it to share posts of informational nature or to put a little bit of travel inspiration out there. Some people who are business oriented, e.g. having their own business or riders who are sponsored, also use this for promotional reasons (again please read the group rules before doing that).

How often to share your posts

If you want to share your posts to several groups keep it down to 2-3 shares a day, ideally spread those over the whole day. There’s nothing more annoying when opening the facebook app and your notification list is spammed by one single persons sharing activity. People will feel annoyed and most likely unfriend you as a result.

Starting to share my posts to different groups I found it hard to keep track of which post I shared to which group, especially since I usually share a couple of different posts to different groups. I want to avoid sharing the same post to the same group twice or more (spam factor again within the group).

So how can you keep track of your own shares?

Facebook logs

First, you could use the facebook “shared content” log.
In your facebook app go to your page and then click on activities on the top. Then choose the “shared content” from that page (sorry for my pictures being in german, that’s what my phone is set to). On your desktop go to your page, go to notifications and then click on shares on the left.

You will get a list of recent shares of posts from your page. But the list is limited to something like the last 5 posts and sometimes your own shares don’t show up there, for instance while writing this article the share I made is not listed in the app (I am not sure what facebook is doing, there seems to be no consistency here like in many other sections of facebook). But even if it showed more it would be a hazzle to scroll through the list and figure out for a specific post where I already had shared it to. It might be better using facebook on the desktop but I simply prefer using my phone and the facebook app to share my content. So for me that option is not useful.

Russian Roulette

I also tried to just randomize the sharing. Just pick a post and share it to a random group I follow. It might work for some people but I am not a random person and my analytic mind requests for a system with structure.

Professional Services

Next would be to use a professional service like Hootsuite, but I don’t know exactly what they offer. Since I am not business oriented and my trip is completely self supported I have no interest in paying for a service I don’t need. If you have a business though, you might wanna look into that option.

My own free and handy approach

So I figured I just need an app with checklists (like todo apps) which supports checklist templates. I didn’t find any free ones for iOS that could do that. But I have been using Evernote for a while and I was happy to find that you can easily create a note with a checklist and also there is a “duplicate” function on a note.

Here’s a quick rundown of how I do it, also scroll through the image carousel below to see how it looks on an iPhone.

1. Login to Evernote or sign up if you don’t have an account, the free basic plan is good enough for this. You can use a desktop computer through the browser or simply download the evernote app in the app store on your phone.
2. If you want you can create a specific notebook and call it something like “Facebook Shares”.
3. Then create a new note, call it something like “Template FB-Share” and create a checklist where every checkbox has the name of a facebook group you follow behind it.
4. When you share a post to a group on facebook, go to evernote, open the “Template FB-Share” note, click on the options menu and duplicate that note.
5. Then rename the note to something meaningful so you know which post it relates to.
6. Then simply activate the checkbox of the group you shared that post to. And do it every time you share a specific post to any group. It works offline too.

Now you are ready to cross-share different posts to different groups without the risk of sharing one post to the same group twice. But again, don’t spam your friends facebook notifications with your shares by sharing more than 2-3 posts a day. Happy sharing!