Hi. My name’s Sarah-Jane, and I’m a Facebook addict. For me, Facebook has proven to be the most successful social media platform, possibly due to the fact that I jumped ship from Myspace at just the right time. (Myspace who?) So imagine my delight at the recent overhauls made by the site, such as the upgrading of business pages to appear in fans’ wall feeds, and the provision of friend lists. Ah, lists. I do like a good list. But this system of sorting friends into categories has proven to be so useful in my use of the big FB, that today I’m going to devote a whole column to it. And possibly go on to start my own cult for the praising of the Facebook friends list. Join me won’t you?
If you haven’t the slightest idea what I’m gibbering about, open your Facebook account, and click ‘Friends’ in the top nav bar. You will see that you now have the option to add these friends to a list, which you can also do at the stage of being friend requested by somebody new. How exciting.
This new development will help you to find the appropriate contact more easily; looking for a DJ to cover an event? Check your music list. Need to pitch some ideas? Lump your media contacts together for future reference. In this way, you’ll be able to build a comprehensive creative database that you’ll be able to consult as needed.
For me the biggest bonus is the ability to control which friends are visible in your homepage newsfeed. If you have a large following, you’ll know that your feed becomes overrun with status updates, image uploads and ‘What Kind of Zombie Would You Be?’ results. Now, you can filter out anybody you don’t need to keep up with daily. You can do this by either unselecting the ‘Show in News Feed’ option of an incoming friend request, using the ‘hide’ button for individuals in the news feed itself, or set which friends list you’d like the information for your news feed to be taken from. To do this, visit your Facebook homepage, and drag and drop the friends list you’d like to be set as the default for your feed to the top of the pile. As you can see, my default list is ‘peeps’ … with a few thousand friends, I always missed the updates from the people I actually wanted to know about, so this is a great way to have your cake and eat it. Flicking through your other lists is good for spotting trends amongst certain sets of people, and keeping up with various industries.
Another major plus of dividing up your contacts is the added privacy it brings in conjunction with certain settings. For instance, you can set individual photo albums to be visible only to friends and family lists, or work colleagues. Again, this is a useful option for those with large friend lists who like the freedom of having a following to promote to, but not the invasiveness of strangers commenting on photos of your children or you in your bikini. Implement this using the ‘settings’ button, and then selecting the ‘privacy’ option.
This has, of course, been a general overview of techniques for social networking; if you’d like to read detailed information and advice on how to make the best of your profiles and accounts, Sarah-Jane will shortly be releasing a set of immensely helpful business E Books, covering this, and many other topics of interest to young creatives, in depth. To receive news of when these guides become available, please send your details to sarahjane@sarahjaneadams.com, or join her on Facebook.
