How to Share Facebook Messages With Non-Facebook Friends
As widespread as Facebook is, not everyone uses social services. Maybe they hate social media, or they are frustrated with Facebook’s constant “ oops ” of privacy, or they are not tech savvy. In this week’s Tech 911, readers ask how they can share content outside of Facebook’s (somewhat) walled garden.
In an email, Lifehacker reader Amy writes:
“I signed up for kidpost.net , a great Facebook messaging service with friends and family who don’t use Facebook. (This also works for Instagram, Twitter, and Flickr.) They close at the end of the month and I can’t find alternatives. That’s when I turn to you for help, but here, at Lifehacker, I haven’t seen anything either. I think that now that #deletefacebook comes out this service is becoming more useful. I’m not going to do it, but a lot of my friends do it. “
The most obvious solution is to simply share your content publicly on Facebook and give your friends and family a link to your profile. However, this is probably not the decision that you (or most people) are willing to make, as you probably don’t want to share your more personal details with the world.
Since you have pointed to kidpost.net, I am also assuming that you want to share information and photos about your child (or children) with other family members and friends who are not on Facebook. I would venture to suggest that most parents do not want to just ruin their children’s lives on social networks for someone to see them.
Even though the service you are using is no longer in use, you can still share the information you post to Facebook with people who are not on Facebook. The easiest way I can think of is to set up an IFTTT trigger that automatically sends an email with the content of the new messages you post to anyone.
How to use IFTTT to post to Facebook via email
Click IFTTT and register an account (if you haven’t already). Once on the website, click the Search button, enter Facebook and connect your account to IFTTT. Do the same for Email, although I also recommend connecting your Gmail account to IFTTT using Gmail — a Gmail account will make this process a lot easier.
When you’re done, click on “My Applets” and select “New Applet”. Click the this link and select the Facebook service. You will now see several triggers that you can (eventually) use to send emails. For example, if you want every plain text status you update on Facebook to be sent to an email address, select that. If you only want to receive emails when posting photo messages, select that. You can even set triggers that only fire when you add a specific hashtag to a text or photo: for example, #forgrandmaandgrandpa (or something shorter).
Whatever your preference, select it, customize any options you’re asked to set (such as a hashtag), and then click the new blue “that” link on the “if, then that” screen that eventually appears.
If you don’t have a Gmail account, you can use an “email” service to send messages to yourself when a Facebook trigger fires – and then you can set a filter on your chosen email service to automatically forward those messages to your email address. a group of people, such as your elders, who are not on social media.
If you have a Gmail account (and have previously connected it to IFTTT, as recommended), you can use the Gmail service to send a Facebook message to multiple people at once. Select it, select “Send Email” and enter the addresses you want to send.
I recommend putting your own email address in the “To:” field and adding everyone else as a Bcc so you don’t get caught up in the tornado with everyone’s responses. You can tweak the body text options to add an informal introduction to the content you send, or you can just leave the text as it is written (if you told those that you are sending an email that you do so they don’t start receiving random messages Facebook like emails out of the blue).
Click Create Action, click Finish and you’re done! Now, any action that you set as a Facebook trigger – like posting a photo – will automatically be triggered as an email containing the content of your message to whoever you want. Resist the urge to blow up your family with 800 photos of your cats.
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