What Facebook actually gives you
Open any post and press Share. The menu offers your own feed, a friend’s timeline, a message, a Page you manage, and a group. Pick a group and a composer opens for that one group, with the original post attached below your text box. Post it, and you are back where you started.
Nothing in that flow multiplies. There is no checkbox list, no “select all”, no recent-groups shortcut that stays open. The menu closes after a single choice by design, and it has behaved this way for years across every desktop and mobile version.
So when the question is “how do I share this to my twelve groups”, the honest answer is that Facebook expects you to do it twelve times.
Why the tools you already pay for cannot do it
This is the part that surprises people who already run a social scheduler.
In January 2024, with Graph API v19.0, Meta announced the removal of the publish_to_groups permission, and enforced it in April 2024. That permission is what let a third-party application publish into a Facebook group on your behalf. It never covered groups you merely joined — only ones you owned or administered — and now it does not exist for third parties at all.
The practical consequence is absolute rather than partial. Buffer, Hootsuite, Later, Sprout Social and every other cloud scheduler lost the ability to touch groups on the same day. They can still publish to Pages and to Instagram. They cannot share a post into a group, schedule one, or queue one, and no pricing tier changes that. If a tool advertises Facebook group posting today, it is either a browser extension or it is describing Pages.
The method that does work
What survived is the browser. An extension runs inside the Facebook session you are already logged into, and does what you would do by hand — open the group, fill the composer, submit — just without you sitting there.
That distinction is the whole thing. It is not talking to an API that no longer exists. It is acting as you, in your browser, at whatever pace you set. Facebook sees your account doing the same actions it would see if you were clicking, which is also why pacing still matters.
What the flow looks like
With MultiGroupPoster installed, a Share to groups button appears in the action bar under any post on facebook.com — in your feed, inside a group, on a Page’s post. Press it and a panel opens over the page:
- Pick how the post should arrive. Share attaches the original post whole, exactly as the native Share does. Copy takes the text and photos and publishes them as a new post of your own. Both are one click apart, and the difference is worth understanding before you choose — see Share or Copy for what Facebook does with each.
- Write your own caption. The line you add sits above the attached post. You can put the post link above or below your caption, whichever reads better.
- Choose your groups. They come from the lists you have already built, so a saved bundle like Local buy-and-sell is one click rather than twelve.
- Set the pace. Delay between groups, how many go out per batch, and whether to pause overnight.
- Send now or schedule it.
The first six shares are free, one group counting as one, which is enough to run a real list once and see how the groups respond before paying for anything.
Sharing is not the same as posting, and groups know it
A share is a wrapper. Inside it sits the original post — the original author’s name, their text, their photos or video — and your caption sits above it. Readers see both layers, and so do admins.
This has three consequences worth planning around.
Attribution travels. If you share a competitor’s post to make a point about it, their name goes with it into every group. That is sometimes exactly what you want, when you are amplifying a customer’s testimonial or a partner’s announcement, and sometimes the opposite.
Some groups reject shares. Plenty of admins want original text and say so in the rules, on the grounds that shares are low effort and clutter the feed. A share into one of those groups is removed and, repeated, gets you removed. Checking the rules before building a share list costs a few minutes and saves the account.
Reach is genuinely unknown. It is tempting to say shares are throttled, and you will find that claim on plenty of marketing blogs. We could not find a published Meta source comparing the same content as a reshare against a new post, and Meta’s own ranking explainer describes a personalised stack of predictions rather than a preference for one post format. The nearest published signal is Meta’s originality guidance, which says duplicative uploads and low-value reproductions of someone else’s work may be shown less — that is aimed at reuploads, not at the native Share button. Anyone who tells you a share reaches 40% fewer people is guessing at a number.
None of that makes sharing wrong. It makes it a different tool: fast, honest about where the content came from, and ideal when the original is the point.
Pacing, because sharing counts
Every share is an action on your account, and it lands in the same bucket as posting, commenting and joining. The account-level limits do not have a separate allowance for shares.
The usual safe range is 50–100 actions a day on an account older than twelve months, with randomised 30–60 second gaps. Accounts six to twelve months old should run about half of that. New accounts should build ordinary activity for a while before any bulk work at all.
The rhythm matters more than the number. Twenty shares at exactly thirty-second intervals is a more obvious machine signature than sixty shares spread unevenly across an afternoon, and constant intervals are the single easiest pattern for an automated system to notice.
Doing it by hand, if you would rather
For a handful of groups, the manual route is fine and costs nothing:
- Find the post and press Share.
- Choose Share to a group.
- Start typing the group name and select it.
- Add your caption and post.
- Return to the original post and repeat.
Two things save time. Open the original post in one tab and keep it there, so you are not hunting for it between shares. And write your caption once in a note, so each pass is a paste rather than a rewrite — though pasting the identical caption into fifteen groups is itself a duplicate-content signal, so vary it if the list is long.
At around a minute per group including the search, twelve groups is a quarter of an hour. That is the number to weigh against installing anything.
Which approach fits
| Manual | Extension | |
|---|---|---|
| Groups per session | 1–5 comfortably | 50+ |
| Time for 20 groups | ~20 minutes | one click, then it runs |
| Scheduling | none | yes |
| Caption variation | retype each time | built in |
| Cost | free | free for the first 6, then $8.99/mo |
| Works on joined groups | yes | yes |
If you share to a few groups occasionally, do it by hand. If the same list gets the same post every week, the manual route is the expensive one.