When you join Facebook you create a profile.
I might as well say this now… You get one profile. It’s your name. First and Last (maybe a maiden name at the end in parenthesis). Nothing more, nothing less. That’s it. Sorry but “Mike Mueller – Super Salesman” isn’t your actual name. You can be deleted for that. Know what else you can be deleted for? It’s actually a violation of the rules to have more than one profile. Yeah I know, you just want to keep your real friends away from your”other” friends? We all do. It’s ok, we’ll cover how to do that with just one profile later.
Back to your Profile. It’s how you sign in. Once you are signed in you can navigate to the back end (http://www.facebook.com/editprofile.php)
From here you can upload a picture, add some info about you (birthday, hometown, etc), where you went to school, where you work, and most importantly your contact information.
Next step – let’s go find our friends. There’s a couple of ways to do this. You could start typing your friends name in the search bar. Facebook will try to find the friend you are looking for in the drop down. What you are looking for is “People” (not Pages).
There’s another way. If you have an online address book or can export your contacts to a .csv you can use that to search and invite them all at once. (http://www.facebook.com/find-friends/)
Now that you are adding friends – let’s put them into LISTS. I like to call them buckets. Sort your friends by putting them into different buckets. You’ll find that some could go into multiple buckets and that’s ok. Just start here: http://www.facebook.com/friends/edit/ and click on the Create a List button.
Next you’ll want to set your privacy and other settings. Luckily, no matter where you are in Facebook they’ll always be at the top right.
Start with Account Settings (https://www.facebook.com/editaccount.php)
Here you can setup your mobile phone, get a Vanity URL (http://www.facebook.com/username/), change your password, and set up what notifications you want and what you don’t want. This may be very important if you want to be notified when someone comments on one of your posts. You can also set up texts to your phone (sms) for various activities.
One of the more important boxes to some is the Secure Browsing (https) setting that is found under “Account Security”. If you only use Facebook at home this isn’t as important but if you have a laptop and are logging into Facebook at coffee shops and other unsecure areas this option could save your profile from being hacked.
Next is the biggest and most important. It’s your Privacy Settings (http://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=privacy). As a matter of fact it’s such an important topic there’s going to be an entire topic on just Privacy. The best part? We’ll have the advanced skills to expertly control our privacy!
* This will be an ongoing series. Make sure you get them all by signing up for the newsletter.
Mike Mueller
He's an avid hockey fan, rides a mountain bike, sometimes rides a road bike, has a few motorcycles (he had a really fast one, bought a cool orange one, rode a really slow one, and wants a really small one). If that isn't enough, he makes cheese and sourdough bread, loves strong beer and good red wine, and poorly plays the Mandolin.
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