5 Effective (and Slightly Badass) Ways to Use Facebook

(January 2008)

When I joined Facebook, I committed at least one embarrassing mistake
that made me want to hide my head in the sand.

I'd like to help you avoid my Facebook pain.

When I started out on Facebook, I had no idea how good it would be. I
tried MySpace (too trashy), Ryze (a bit clunky) and LinkedIn (very
cool in different ways from Facebook) and liked Facebook for its ease
of use and clean user interface.

When you join this social networking community – and it's a great
networking and marketing tool, so you should – do the following.

1. Include a photo of yourself: This should be the first thing you do.
Seeing the ??? in place of a photo is annoying. Ideally, you are
joining Facebook to network, catch up with old friends, or market your
business. People need to see a face to know if it's you.

2. Incorporate Twitter: NOTE: If you don't know what Twitter is yet,
this will probably make no sense. You can share your Tweets (what you
Twitter) on your Facebook profile page. This is a convenient way to
share your blog post URLs, useful URLs from other websites, and random
news that would be too small for a regular blog post. For an example,
see my Twitter microblog. You can make your own Twitter
microblog show up in your Facebook profile and update it from Facebook.

3. Post Links of Interest: Use the Post tool to share URLs that would
interest your friends and business colleagues. You can include
articles from other sites or your own articles. The title and an
excerpt from the article will automatically appear, and you can
include a brief explanation of why you're posting it.

4. Fill Out Your Profile Info: This is how people find you. I hear
people say (only occasionally, thank god) that they fill out false
information or don't fill out any at all so that they won't receive
Facebook ads.

Think why you are joining this site. You want people to find you. So,
fill out the information you are comfortable providing and move on to
creating your privacy settings. By the way, use your real name.
Getting a friend request from "Baltimore Zombie" is going to disturb
someone.

5. Friend People; Don't Sell Them Stuff: Don't friend people, have
them accept and then try to sell them something within five minutes.
Nothing will make me "de-friend" someone faster.

Visit your personal home page when you log into Facebook. Your home
page houses the all-important feed. Once you have some friends, start
paying attention to what shows up in your feed. I received a bunch of
interesting articles from one friend and learned how to post my own
links that will show up in other's feeds.

Now, I get people to visit my site, and they've decided to come
because they're interested in what I'm saying. One friend recently
posted about how an article I wrote helped her troubleshoot her PC.

Here's the other thing. If your friends hate what shows up in their
feeds, they can give it a thumbs down and they won't get feed bits
like that in the future. If you thumbs up and thumbs down the items in
your personal feed, then Facebook will get to "know" you and what you
want to see there.

I hope this article spares you some Facebook pain. The other day, I
sent out a post to a group of 20 friends. What I did not realize is
that every time a person responded, an email was sent to the entire 20
people. Yikes! How annoying for them. I looked pretty dumb, but I
thankfully have understanding friends. All the same, I won't be using
that feature again anytime soon.