So everyone you know is on Facebook. Maybe, like me, you want a way to keep track of different groups. Some of your connections may be business, others may be personal. How can you use one platform, keep everyone organized and follow what is going on? Friend lists are your answer.
The Friend list feature on Facebook is one of the best tools you can utilize to organize your “peeps”. They allow you to categorize your friends for organization, and to make managing access and messaging easier. The best place to start is to group your contacts into different categories. *Hint, once you do this, you can limit certain people’s access to specific sections of your Facebook profile. This can be of great value if you are in the business vs. personal dilemma.
You might be thinking that you can achieve the same separation of your messages by creating two different FaceBook profiles. This isn’t recommended. For one, it’s against Facebook’s stated rules, and if you create duplicate accounts, you could be disabled. The second reason is that it takes enough time, effort and energy to keep up with one profile, let alone two…so where will you find the time? My advice is to use one platform, and one account. Just figure out how to make it work for you.
So, even if you could create multiple profiles, you will still have to come to some type of organizational plan. Let’s just stick to one account, and set up a friends list so you can be more efficient. By doing this, you can allow certain people to see your newsfeed status, and limit the people who see that you are available in Facebook chat.
Here’s how to set up lists:
1. Click on the “Account” item on the top right of the main FaceBook page.
2. Click on the “Edit Friends” option.
3. Select the “Create A List” option.
4. Assign a name to your list. (No one other than you will see the name of this list)
5. Add friends to the list.
You can create as many lists as you’d like. You can organize friends according to geography, region or location. You can also set up a list for clients, customers, suppliers and more.
To utilize the lists you should head to your Facebook Home page, and use the filter up at the top by clicking the arrow next to the “Most Recent” tab, and choose which feeds from which lists you would like to look at. You can also identify which list gets to see your status updates.
To identify who can see the status updates, Click on the blue arrow beside the “Share” button and click the “customize” option, and you will be able to block certain lists from seeing your updates. Finally, you will also be able to perform the same filtering functions in FaceBook chat.
