I admit, I’m sloppy. I post things to Facebook then realize I have typos or forget to link to a company or similar. Can I fix things after I post them on Facebook?
Most people seem to think that Facebook status updates and posts are carved in stone and that once posted there’s no way to fix or update anything. Turns out, however, that there’s a lot of editing you can do even before you click on the “Post” button and a fair amount you can do afterwards, once it’s gone live. There are some things you can’t modify, like changing photos after you’ve garnered comments on the image, but it’s surprisingly flexible. The trick is to know where to click.
To demonstrate, I’m going to post a status update with all sorts of errors.
We’ll start here, with me pasting in an update that includes a URL:
Look closely and you’ll see a couple of problems.
The biggest of the issues is that there’s a typo in the actual text that Facebook has pulled from the post because, well, there’s a typographical error in the title of the linked post. D’oh. See it? “audiphile”, not “audiophile”.
To fix it, I’ll click on the title and it magically turns editable:
Here I can tweak the wording and fix the typo. Good.
While I’m here, I can also click on the excerpt immediately below, and edit that. Sort of:
Click out of that field, however, and that particular field doesn’t update. Annoying, to say the least!
But the “audiphile” typo is fixed, notice.
A click on “Post” and it’s live:
Oh, wait. I wanted to link to the audioengine Facebook page in the actual update. Darn it!
At this point you can’t just click on the text, you need to click on the tiny downward triangle on the top right. See it? A click and…
Now the status update itself shows up in an editable widget:
I delete the letters “@audioengine” and retype them enough so that Facebook sees it’s a requested link and pops up a menu of matches, as you can see above. The first one’s the company, so I click on that and slightly tweak the wording, including removing the rather ugly URL from the status too.
The final result:
A status update to be proud of! And now you know how to fix things, even if the post’s already live.