9 Effective (and Slightly Badass) Ways to Use Facebook

I joined Facebook 4-5 months ago. I committed at least one embarrassing mistake, at least one social networking crime.

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.

1. Include a photo of yourself: Seeing the “?” in place of a photo is downright annoying. Ideally, you are joining Facebook to network, catch up with old friends, or market your business. People need to see a face to know if it’s you or not.

2. Incorporate Twitter: NOTE: If you don’t know what Twitter is yet, this will probably make no sense. You can share your Tweets (what you Twitter) on your Facebook profile page. This 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. For an example, see my Twitter microblog. You can make your own Twitter microblog show up in your Facebook profile and update it from Facebook.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.”

7. 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.” I’ve done this several times with people I was not 100% sure about.

Once you fill out some profile information and find and add a few friends, you’ll start to get roughly one zillion friend requests. If you have your settings configured to send you updates via email, you’ll get a notice for each of these in your email. You might want to change that setting in the profile settings area. Personally, I like to receive the notices via email.

8. Calm Down When It Comes to 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 added a few I get a kick out of such as one to share my current mood, one to share my carbon footprint, and one to share where I’ve been in the world. Of course, I also use the completely and 100% cool Twitter updater.

9. Bow Down to the Coolness of the Timeline and Feed: The feed is your communication tool on Facebook. In a way, the feed is the new email.

Don’t skip your personal home page and jump straight to your profile. Your home page houses the feed. Once you have some friends, start paying attention to what shows up there. I received a bunch of interesting articles from one friend and learned how to post my own links that will show up in other’s feeds. I get people to visit my site, and they’ve decided to come because they’re interested in what I’m saying. One friend recently posted about how an article I wrote helped her troubleshoot her PC.

For the record, I post my own links as well as links from other sites, and I only post URLs I think my friends will find interesting.

Here’s the other thing. If your friends hate what shows up in their feeds, they can give it a thumbs down and they won’t get feed bits like that in the future. If you thumbs up and thumbs down the items in your personal feed, then Facebook will get to “know” you and what you want to see there. I think this is a cool feature, because my friends straddle various worlds. The poetry people might not be interested in SEO and the SEO people might not be interested in poetry. This thumbs down/up feature gives everyone a chance to say what they want to see in the future. That’s good for me and for them.

When I started out on Facebook, I had no idea how good it would be. I tried MySpace (too trashy), Ryze (a bit clunky) and LinkedIn (very 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. The other day, I sent out a post to a group of 20 friends. What I did not realize is that every time a person responded, an email was sent to the entire 20 people. Yikes! How annoying for them. I looked pretty dumb, but I thankfully have understanding friends. All the same, I won’t be using that feature again anytime soon.

Tagged as: Facebook, how to use facebook