How to Share a File With Your Facebook Friends

There may be situations when you would like to share files with Facebook friends.The file may be a text or word document, an mp3 song, an image or may be a video. For example, you may not know the email address of your Facebook friend and hence don’t have any option to privately share files with your Facebook friend.

Unfortunately, Facebook is not so focussed on file sharing yet and does not have a feature which allows you to send files to anyone in your friend list or send files to a group of friends or send files to someone whom you are not friends with. However, you can use Facebook messages to share any file with anyone on Facebook.

Here is how to get started

1. Login to your Facebook account and go to the person’s Facebook profile, to whom you want to send a file or multiple files.

2. Hit the “Message” icon to compose a new message. Note that unlike instant messaging, you can send Facebook messages to any Facebook user, just like you can send email to anyone on earth as long as you know his/her email address.

3. In the compose pane of the Message box, hit “Attach files”.

When you are done attaching files, hit the “Send” button.

Your Facebook friend will receive the file in his “Message” inbox. If you sent the file to someone whom you are not friends with, he will receive your file in his “Other” inbox folder. Related: Forward Facebook messages to Gmail

Here are some points to note, when you share files with Facebook frien

Files are always shared privately and this activity is not shared in your Facebook wall, profile or timeline. In short, your friends will not know when you are sharing files with any of your Facebook friends.
You can send any file via Facebook messages. This includes word documents, excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, text files, audio, video, zip and RAR archive file formats.
File uploads are deleted when you delete a Facebook message thread or conversation.
Your friends can forward your message to their Facebook friends, which will forward your file to their friends. Hence, you should be careful enough and should not share confidential information or very private files via Facebook messages.
You can share a bunch of files with multiple Facebook friends. Just create a group conversation, add all the recipients and attach your files.

Sharing Files on Facebook with FilesAnywhere

If you have a Filesanywhere account, you can use it to upload and share file with your Facebook friends. Just add the Filesanywhere Facebook application and you can upload files, images, videos ,documents etc in your Facebook profile. Your friends can send you files and download files from your Facebook profile. Comes with a 1 GB free storage account which would be enough for your needs. You can also play songs as your Facebook status update using CloudApp.

Written by Amit Banerjee on Monday, November 30th, 2009