Facebook Tips You Should Know

Here are a few Facebook tips we were talking about today that will make for some light reading on a this Friday afternoon.

Facebook Uses a BFF Meter

In a recent update, Facebook took the liberty of keeping the flow of your friends' news to a manageable level.  I'm not sure if its to keep your little brain from exploding or to help Facebook manage the traffic of now over 400 million users. 

Here's the fix: 

1. Click on the Home feed in the upper right hand corner of your screen. 
2. Then click on Most Recent just below that.
3. Then scroll all the way to the bottom and tap on Edit Options. 
4. Now you can change the 250 or whatever is in that Number of Friends box to the maximum of 5,000. 

You can also use those boxes to Show More or Hide certain friends.  That's one way.

The other more simple and less mechanical method of ensuring all of your friends show up in your stream is to engage with them!  Make a post on their wall.  Facebook uses that activity to rank your BFFs  (best friends forever) for priority.  

Facebook Has a Sense of Humor

Not long ago when the iPad frenzy was at its peak, I glanced upon the above Facebook ad.  Holy crap I thought, they are looking for a select group of people to try out the new iPad – 52 year-olds just just like me!  So, I clicked on the ad.

Then it hit me – and I felt like a complete idiot.  Just as Facebook runs metrics to determine which of your friends are your BFF's, they are using the same technology to sell to you.  Pretty smart, huh? 

Now consider what can happen when Facebook combines all of this information about what's in our profiles with our friend activity?  Think of the demographic picture they can create for targeting specific consumers?  Every word you use, every post you make (..sounds like Sting), they all accumulate to create a razor sharp profile of who you are.  It boggles the mind to think of where this can go.

Facebook Isn't Vegas – Links are Public

What happens on your Facebook wall indeed is like what happens in Vegas.  It stays among you and the friends you let into your circle.  However, that is not the case with links, which includes what happens on Notes pages, such as this example.

This information came to me today via Google Alerts,and it really gave me a laugh.  My son had made a post (more of a plea) on Facebook in an attempt to get a free pair of tickets to a Jay-Z concert.  Thankfully, he represented himself well, because Google has now indexed that information, which means its here to stay.

Hey, I'm sure my son still looks up to me.  It just appears that for the moment Jay-Z is the front runner in his world.  This much I know – he certainly has a career ahead of him in sales!

There are a lot of people that freak out about all of this.  They are obsessed with privacy settings.  You can't fight the fact that there are powerful forces (search engines) – who are working against your privacy efforts.  Here's a better approach.

Just be a good human being.

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