How Can I Upload a PDF File to Facebook?

Facebook is more than a place for posting cat memes and searching for great restaurants. Both consumers and businesses use the social media platform as a way to communicate. Occasionally, that communication may need to come in the form of a PDF. You can post PDFs to Facebook pages and groups, but to share one on your personal profile, you first need to convert it to an image.

PDFs are mostly for businesses. Think about it: A business needs to be able to share PDFs of items such as menus and flyers, so Facebook added that capability to pages and groups. While this is understandable, it's frustrating if you're only trying to share a PDF with your friends and family members on your personal profile.

Where there's a will, there's a way. To share a PDF on your personal Facebook profile, you need to convert it to an image. You can find free PDF-to-JPG file converters online. Just upload the PDF to the converter, download the converted image and upload it to your Facebook profile as you would any other photo.

If you have a Facebook page, you can share a PDF on Facebook, but there's a complication with that; unless you're a restaurant, you may not like the way your PDF is presented. Facebook posts all PDFs to the Menu section. Visitors to your page must click About, followed by Menu, to see your PDF, which is bound to confuse them if the PDF is anything but a menu.

For that reason, the best approach is to convert your PDF to an image and then share it to the page as a post or upload it as an image. You can create a photo album if you have multiple PDFs to share.

You have an easier time if you want to post a PDF to a Facebook group. Every group has a section labeled Files. One way to share a file with your group is to go to the Files section, select Upload File and upload your PDF there. You can also create a document from scratch there.

However, you might find it easier to share the post the way you would any other post in your group. You can post PDFs to Facebook groups by going to the box where you start a discussion. Click on the More drop-down box and select Add File. From there, you choose the file from your computer and share it. Your members can see the file in the group feed, but you may also want to upload it to Files if you want everyone to be able to find it later.

In some instances, you may find it beneficial to share a PDF on Facebook privately. You can do that in Messenger. Create a message as you would normally and use the Add Files icon to find the document you want to share. You can add multiple people in the To field to share the file with a specific group.

In some instances, you may want to share PDFs on Facebook using your phone. That can be a bit trickier. In iOS, PDFs are saved to the Books app, so you have to track down the PDF there when you browse for your file in Messenger. On Android devices, browse to the file from Facebook Messenger and share it.