How to Ask Supporters to Share Social Media Posts

Today a nonprofit client asked for some tips about how to increase awareness about their COVID-19 reopening strategy. After closing their resale store for weeks, they were disappointed by the low volume of donations and store visitors.

As a small nonprofit with a tiny marketing budget, we skipped paid ads and instead talked about getting more supporters to share their organic (unpaid) social media posts.

Here are some quick instructions I shared that you can use to send a simple email to some high profile supporters, asking them to share a recent Facebook post. The trick is to make the ask as simple as possible, by providing one-click sharing links.

Creating a Sharing Link for a Facebook Post

First, publish a post on your Facebook Page that you want your supporters to share.

On the published post, click the grey text that contains the date and time the post was published (this only works in a browser, not in a Facebook app):

Clicking this date link will open a URL for that specific Facebook post in your browser. The URL will look something like this:

https://www.facebook.com/YourPageName/posts/123456789

Copy this post-specific URL to your clipboard.

Then we're going to open up a nifty website called Share Link Generator in a new browser tab.

Now, paste the Facebook post-specific URL into the Facebook sharing link generator and click the "Create the Link" button:

Copy and paste the resulting link to your clipboard, and when you write an email to your supporters asking them to share your post, provide that link!

Make it super-obvious what you need your supporters to do: explain the ask in your email and then end with the text "Click here to share on Facebook". Then highlight that last sentence and use the tools in Gmail or Outlook to turn it into a hyperlink that points to the sharing URL generated above.