I often write posts about Twitter so I thought I would do one on Facebook, and since the new timeline has just been introduced for personal accounts and pages I thought it would be the perfect time to provide you with some tips and tricks that I’ve come across recently.
Firstly I hope that many of these tips will benefit not just business users of Facebook but personal users too, I use Facebook for both business and pleasure so always on the look out for new tips!
No more clicking, you can hover!
Many of the things you used to do on Facebook required you to click on pages or friends, but now if you hover over the page or person a little menu comes up where you can choose various options.
The tips below can all be carried out either by clicking or hovering, it’s up to you!
Want to follow someone but not add them as a friend?
You need to Subscribe – you will only be able to see their public updates and to do this you just click on (or hover over) the person you’d like to subscribe to and then at the top of their profile next to Add Friend there is a Subscribe button. You can choose whether to add them to an interest (we’ll come to them shortly!) or just see their updates in your News Feed.
To unsubscribe from someone’s updates all you need to do is hover over the person’s name and a menu comes up, choose unsubscribe.
Want to group pages into categories to make it easier to follow relevant content?
You need Interests!
Very similar to Twitter Lists, Facebook has recently introduced these to Pages (we’ve had lists for sometime for personal users) – interests work in the same way as personal lists but you can add pages (or people you subscribe to).
To create a new interest start by clicking on someone you would like to add to an interest. If you are friends with the person you click the little down arrow on the small cog at the top right and click Add to Interest Lists, then click +New List. For a page it’s the same, click on the cog and Add to Interest Lists, either choose +New List or add to one you’ve already set-up. When setting up a new list you can choose whether you make it public, private or just available to friends. If you’re a business I would suggest making some of your lists public, that way you encourage new likes to your page.
Your new Interest Lists will be displayed at the bottom left hand corner, when you click on a list there are some things you can change at the top right hand corner, to do this click on Manage Lists.
Fed-up of seeing too many updates in your News Feed?
You need this great little tip… Show in News Feed!
I found this today while visiting a couple of pages that I had planned to unlike, but instead of unliking I chose the new option of unticking ‘Show in News Feed’. All you need to do is hover over the ‘Liked’ button and untick, so easy!
Want to send one of your liked pages a message?
Now you can if the page admin as chosen this option, it means you can easily send a message as you would a friend. If you are a page admin then you will need to activate this in your new admin panel (timeline), messages will also appear in the admin panel at the top.
I am sure there are some tips and tricks I haven’t mentioned here, but these are the ones I have been using most since the timeline has been introduced, if you have any more you’d like to share then just leave a comment below.
If you haven’t yet visited my Facebook page, then please pop over and say hello!
