Two different objects
Press the native Share button on a Facebook post and you do not duplicate anything. You create a new post whose contents are that post. The original sits inside yours as an attached card — the author’s name, their words, their photos or video — and your caption sits above it. Two layers, visibly.
Copying is a different operation. The text is read out of the source, the photos are pulled down and re-uploaded, and what appears in the group is a single-layer post of your own. No card, no second author, nothing pointing back unless you put it there.
The reason this distinction is worth ten seconds of thought is that everything downstream follows from it: who gets credited, which group rules apply, what a reader reacts to, and whether you needed permission.
The attribution question
This is the part most comparisons skip.
A reshare is self-attributing. Whatever else happens to it, the original author’s name travels along and readers can click through. You cannot accidentally pass someone’s work off as yours with a share, because the format will not let you.
A copy has no such property. It reproduces material under your name, and if the words were not yours, the post does not say so. That is fine when you are redistributing your own announcement across your own groups — the usual case. It is not fine when the source is a customer’s review, a partner’s write-up, or a post from a group you are a member of.
Adding a link to the original helps a reader find their way back. It is not permission. If you did not write it and have no right to republish it, the link underneath does not fix that; resharing does, because resharing is the format that keeps the authorship attached.
”New post” does not mean “original content”
There is a trap in the vocabulary. Copy mode creates a new post, and it is easy to slide from there to original content, which is a different claim entirely.
Meta’s originality guidance, published in March 2026, says duplicative uploads and low-value reproductions of another creator’s work may be shown to fewer people. The object you created being new does not make its contents original in the sense Meta means. A copied post is still reproduced material — it just no longer says so on the surface.
The practical reading: copying your own post across fifteen groups is redistribution and unremarkable. Copying somebody else’s is reproduction, and Meta has said what it thinks of that.
Video decides for you
If the source post contains a video, Copy is unavailable and the post is reshared whole.
This is a technical limit rather than a policy one. Text can be read and photos can be fetched and re-uploaded; a video inside a Facebook post cannot be lifted out and re-published the same way. Rather than silently dropping the video and posting the text alone — which would be worse, because the video was usually the point — the share goes out as a share, with the whole original attached.
You will see this called out before you send. It is the one case where the decision is made for you, and it is the right call: your groups get the entire original including the video, which is what you wanted anyway.
Where the link sits
When your caption includes a link back to the source, its position changes what the reader meets first.
Put the link below your caption and the reader gets your framing, then the source. That suits commentary — here is why this matters for our group — where your point is the content and the original is evidence.
Put it above and the reader gets attribution, then your note. That suits amplification — the original is the content, I am just carrying it — and it reads as more honest when the material is somebody else’s.
Neither is a ranking trick. It is a sentence-order decision, and it takes one toggle.
Which one to choose
| Share | Copy | |
|---|---|---|
| Who appears as author | original author, plus you | you |
| What readers see | your caption + the original as a card | one post, yours |
| Video | ✓ carried whole | ✗ not possible |
| Photos | inside the original | re-uploaded into yours |
| Right choice when | the material is someone else’s, or the original is the point | the words are yours and should stand alone |
| Groups that ban shared posts | will remove it | unaffected |
The last row catches people out. A meaningful minority of group admins disallow shared posts on the grounds that they are low effort. If a group’s rules say original text only, Share is not a stylistic preference there — it is a removal.
The reach question, honestly
Every comparison of this kind eventually gets asked which one Facebook favours, and the honest answer is that nobody outside Meta knows.
We looked for a published source comparing the same content as a reshare against a new post. We did not find one. Meta’s ranking explainer describes a personalised stack of predictions — relationships, predicted engagement, integrity checks, content type among many others — and states no preference between the two formats. The originality guidance above is the closest published signal, and it is about reuploads, not about the Share button.
So choose on the things you can reason about: who wrote it, whether the group allows shares, whether there is a video, and whether attribution helps or hurts your point. Those are knowable. Reach is not, and a vendor who quotes you a percentage on it invented the number.