I joined Facebook in 2008. I committed at least one embarrassing mistake.
I would like to help you avoid my pain.
When you join Facebook — and it’s a great networking and marketing tool, so you should — do the following.
- Create Lists of Friends: You can divide your friends into lists that let you show each group different content that appeals to them. If you don’t want people to see certain parts of your profile, you can use the privacy settings to put your photos or status updates in “private” mode.
- Incorporate Twitter: Usually, I am against this idea because it’s rarely done well. However, you can share your Twitter feed on your Facebook profile page. As with anything, you have to decide if this works for you and your brand. Some people have vastly different audiences on Twitter and Facebook and each audience requires a different style of writing. If incorporating the two works for you, it is a convenient way to share your blog post URLs, useful URLs from other websites, and random news that would be too small for a regular blog post.
- Post Links of Interest: Use the Post tool to share URLs that would interest your friends and business colleagues. You can include articles from other sites or your own articles. The title and an excerpt from the article will automatically appear, and you can include a brief explanation of why you’re posting it.
- Fill Out Your Profile Info: This is how people find you. I hear people say (only occasionally, thank god) that they fill out false information or don’t fill out any at all so that they won’t receive Facebook ads. Think why you are joining this site. You want people to find you. That is the point of social networking. So, fill out the information you are comfortable providing and move on to creating your privacy settings. By the way, use your real name. Getting a friend request from “Baltimore Zombie” is going to disturb someone.
- Change Your Privacy Settings: Go into the privacy tab and check what you want to share with others. Maybe you don’t want everyone to see your home phone and address. Select what you’re comfortable sharing with others.
- Friend People; Don’t Sell Them Stuff: Don’t friend people, have them accept and then try to sell them something. Nothing will make me “de-friend” someone faster. Don’t friend people if you’ve never met them and have no connection to them. I get friend requests from people I’ve never met. They decided to friend me randomly. See #4 for why you should not accept a friend request from someone with a weird fake name like “Baltimore Zombie.”
- Friend with Privacy: If you do decide to accept a friend request from someone you don’t know that well, keep in mind you can prevent them from seeing your entire profile. When you approve the friend request, you can click “can only see my limited profile.”
- Don’t Get the Emails: Facebook can be a huge timesuck. If you have a project you want to complete, Facebook can set you behind. I keep my Facebook usage to a minimum by not receiving emails for each friend request, etc. If I received all of those, I would do nothing but manage my Facebook profile and be very sad indeed.
- Decide on Applications: After you add a selection of the zillion friends mentioned above, you’ll start to get “hotness requests” and sent “gifts” and basically receive numerous invitations to add applications. A lot of these are useless, don’t work properly, or are annoying for various reasons. I find they take too much time and I can’t keep track of what personal information they want, so I avoid them all.
When I started out on Facebook, I had no idea how good it would be (this post was written before all of the privacy scares). I tried MySpace (too trashy), Ryze (a bit clunky) and LinkedIn (cool in different ways from Facebook) and liked Facebook for its ease of use and clean user interface.
I hope this article spares you some Facebook pain and helps you get up to speed.
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Very useful information, Deborah. I’ve often wondered how to make Facebook work for business. Some of those applications are just plain annoying. I couldn’t make MySpace work, Ryze was too “clunky” as you say, and LinkedIn, well, I’m still not sure about that either. I’d really like to meet one person who has made social networking pay off for business. Seriously.
That’s a good overview. I joined at MySpace earlier in the year, and it has mostly been a new avenue for spam in my life. I’ll give Facebook a closer look, now.
Ah, thanks for the tips. I haven’t done too much with Facebook yet, but I’m hoping to put it to good use!
Excellent tips, thanks. I posted the link on Madam Mayo.
Stephen, Good luck! FB is one of the most visited sites on the internet. It’s in competition with Google.
CM Thank you for the mention on your blog.
Deborah/Click Wisdom
Thanks. I agree about MySpace. I love Facebook because I found fellow writers, aha, people like me. The first thing I did on Facebook was post my pix on the person’s page who had invited me and then didn’t have a clue for how remove it. I’ve also been puzzled by all those Karma, blahblah things..as in Yikes, what do I do now, so thanks for the tips.
I kind of refuse to join Facebook, in a rather weird protest againts this concept. But maybe in the future I’ll join this virtual world. In that case, maybe i should bookmark your post. Just in case…
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