How To Optimize Facebook with Friends Lists, Part 1

Tough to keep up with everyone in Facebook?  Have you added a lot of friends, and now everything’s a clutter?  Facebook has an often unexplored feature called Friend Lists.

Friends lists are a little more obvious and easy to find in the new Facebook design than they were in the old one.  Clearly, it’s something Facebook wants to emphasize.  So, why do you need to use lists?  How will they help you?

It’s easiest to demonstrate this by example.  Among my Facebook friends, I have fellow marketers, fellow science enthusiasts, classmates, people I went to high school with, family members and people with whom I’ve entered a joint venture or two.  About a year ago, I started categorizing all my Facebook friends into lists.  If the same person fit multiple categories, Facebook would let me put them in as many categories as I like.  If a family member was also a classmate, I could put them in both my Family and Classmates lists.

What makes this so great?

Well, before, it made it really easy to send messages to multiple people.  If I wanted to invite all my family members to a get-together, I could just type the name of that list as the person I’m sending the message to, and everyone in that list gets the message.

What else makes Facebook lists so important?  Two words:  Privacy Settings.

Facebook allows you to customize your privacy settings for each list of friends.  Say you have a big generic list of friends called “Business Contacts” and another list called “Personal Contacts”.  You can make it so that your business contacts don’t see certain elements of your profile, such as your wall, status updates or even your other friends on Facebook.

With the new Facebook homepage, there’s a third reason why Facebook Friends Lists are huge:  Now you can sort your newsfeed by Friends lists and group posts and whatnot.  If you’re just interested in seeing updates from your Classmates at the moment, then you can click the “Classmates” list, available to the left of your newsfeed, and it will only show you updates from people in that list.  To see updates from everyone again, just click “News Feed”.   So, without further ado…

How To Create Facebook Friends Lists

First, login to Facebook, obviously.  Then, click Friends.

This will show you all your friends.  From here, in the left panel, click the option to “Make a Friends List”.

Facebook is now helpful enough to guide you through the rest of the process.  The first step is to name the list to be.  You can change the name later if you like.  To do that, you’ll need to click “Friends”, then move the mouse cursor over one of the lists in the left panel, which will bring up an “edit” option.  Click “edit” and you can change the name of the list.

Then, you just start adding your friends by typing their names or clicking “Select Multiple Friends”.

At this point, you’re finished creating your list.  From here, you can also send a message to a list, or even delete the list if you’ve changed your mind.  Those options are just below the middle panel that contains all the friends in your list.  When you delete a list, it does not delete the friends you put in that list.  It only deletes the list itself, not the actual friends in the list.  The option appears as follows:

That sums up establishing a list.  Now, what about privacy settings?  Look for a post with details on optimizing your Facebook profile for both your personal and professional contacts tomorrow morning.  Thanks for taking the time to read thus far!  Any feedback on whether or not this post has been helpful to you is welcome.

Technorati Tags: Facebook, Friends Lists, Optimization, Privacy, Social Media, Social Networking, Tutorial, Web 2.0