I just learned how to enjoy Facebook more

August 24, 2009 by John Dilbeck · 12 Comments
Filed under: Facebook, Friends and Family, Social Networking 

I don’t spend a lot of time on Facebook, but I do go there two or three times per week to see what my friends are doing.

I’m not one of those people who goes “friend crazy” on Facebook. I have just under 300 friends there.

Lately, I’ve been getting tired of going to the Facebook home page, because I just wasn’t interested in what I was seeing most of the time.

But, this evening, based on a chance comment I read somewhere yesterday, Facebook got a lot more enjoyable for me.

I’ve been reading a lot of blogs over the weekend and someone — I don’t remember who — said something about Facebook friend lists in passing. He or she didn’t go into any depth to explain it, but it stuck in my mind, somehow.

This evening, when I went to Facebook, I went to their help center and found out what friend lists are.

Over the last few weeks (months?) I’ve seen the “Add to list” link when someone requests to become my friend, but I never thought about it.

Tonight, I learned that I can create multiple lists to segment all of my friends into smaller, more useful groups.

I went to the Friends tab on Facebook and waited for the drop-down menu to appear and then I chose the All Friends link.

Then I went through all my friends there and added many of them to one or more lists. I created a list for close friends, another for family, another for bloggers, one for Squidoo friends, one for marketing, and so forth. I may go back and add other lists, but I’m pretty happy with what I accomplished this evening in a surprisingly short time.

I was also a bit surprised when I realized I had not a single clue who some of the people were who I had accepted as friends. I don’t remember ever seeing some of their names. Over the next few weeks, I’ll visit the profiles of the ones I don’t remember. Unless there is a good reason to keep them, I’ll be removing them from my friends.

After all, how much of a friend can they be if I don’t even remember who they are?

So, after doing all of this, I still didn’t see how it would be useful to me.

I went to the Facebook home page and still saw the same old mish-mash of updates that weren’t very interesting to me.

Then, I looked into the left column and saw some links. At the bottom of the short list was the link labeled “more.” I clicked it and there were my brand new friend lists.

I clicked on the Family link and a few seconds later all the updates were from my family members on Facebook. Now, that was interesting and useful!

After reading that, I clicked on the Close Friends list and read what they were up to.

Next I clicked on the Marketing list and enjoyed reading their updates – for the most part. It turns out that some of the updates really weren’t all that interesting. I may be removing some of the people in that list from my friends.

In the next few minutes, I clicked on each new list, in turn, and really enjoyed reading updates that were more or less grouped by people in categories in which I was interested.

I can already tell that I’ll spend more time on my Family and Close Friends lists as I continue to use Facebook.

Several people are on multiple lists.

It was interesting that I chose to add some people I know in real life as Close Friends and a few people I’ve never met in person, but who feel like close friends, anyway.

Maybe you already know all about this and you’ve been doing it forever and wonder how I could be so dense. That’s okay. Sometimes it just takes me awhile to learn to use the features each tool offers.

I know for certain that I’ll be using friend lists on Facebook from here on out.

What about you?

Act on your dream!

JD

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