Use your Facebook lists!
As our use of Facebook evolves we are building up “friends” in very different areas of our lives. We have our close family, our not so close family, close friends, business associates, work colleagues and on and on. Each plays a specific role in our lives and what we do.
And as these friends grow it becomes important to deliver the right messages to the right people. By not paying attention to this you may be offending or upsetting groups of friends or you might be getting blocked by people that you may later want to engage.
Say you’ve had a particularly bad day and want to vent a little. No problem, but let those closest to you know about it and not your business colleagues.
If you want to talk business make those updates available to your business network (and it is quite possible you have friends for different areas of business).
In this way you are talking to the right people about what is most real to them. Our personal and work lives have become blurred, as I wrote about here but the fact is that your poker friends may not want to know about the goings on at work and your important business contacts may not need to know about your family get together. When you are talking to all your friends about what they care about, your network will increase in value.
Ok, great so how do you do it?
First you need to assign all your FB friends to lists. This is the hard part and may take some time if you’ve never done it. But once done, maintaining it is pretty simple. Every time you send a friend request you are able to add the person to a list right away. The same thing when you accept a request. How do you edit your lists?
On your profile on the left hand side you’ll see a heading “LISTS”. Click on this and you’ll be able to create lists and add friends to lists.
Now, every time you write a status update you have the option to select who sees it:
Click the button next to “post” and click the list you want to include in your update. Now only those friends will be able to see that post.
IMPORTANT: Facebook will save your last selection and assume it for your next update, so remember to change it as needed.
Using lists will take a long way in building an even better network.
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