Facebook is a great way experiment with social media. You can use it to:
1) Keep up with friends
2) Get the feel of being part of a virtual community by finding and interacting with people who have similar interests to yours,
3) Tell people about your blog/website or business
How to make a personal profile:
Go to the Facebook main page and fill out the information on the sign-up screen. When you want to edit your profile info, click the “edit profile” button in the top right corner of your profile. Then choose the section you’d like to edit from the left-hand menu. You can check out the Facebook help page to get answers to questions about privacy settings, how to set up features like news feeds, playing games, uploading pictures, etc.
Now that you’ve gotten your feet wet with Facebook, one of the most important things to learn the is difference between personal pages, groups, and fan pages.
Personal Pages:
Facebook is now calling personal pages “profiles” or “timelines” (I guess calling it a “personal page” makes too much sense). Profiles (timelines) represent individuals and must be held under an individual name. This is the type of page to have if you want to communicate w/friends and family, put personal pictures on your page, rant about issues you think are important, “like” other people’s fan pages, etc. You can only have one profile page, but you can have many group and fan pages associated with it.
Groups:
People use groups to communicate with the important communities in their lives like their classmates or teammates.
You’ve always been able to post updates to groups, but now you can post questions and polls for just members to answer, such as “What movie should we see?” or “When should we should hold our next soccer practice?” You also have the option of uploading pictures or entire albums directly to your group, making it even easier to share your photos with the people who most want to see them. Facebook has also added a control that lets group owners approve people before they are added to the group.
Fan pages:
Fan pages represent entities like businesses, organizations, music groups, celebrities, etc. The information on a fan page is generally public and available for everyone to see. It’s a good way to keep fans updated on events, special promotions, and other official information that you want them to know. Anyone can become a fan by “liking” the page, and then information from the page will show up in the news feed on their page.
You can start a fan page from your personal page if you’re an official representative of the organization, but you must have your personal profile (timeline) set up first. Once you have set up a page within your profile, you can add other admins to help you manage it. People who choose to connect to your page won’t be able to see that you are the page admin or have any access to your personal account. Fan pages also come with the ability to see information on who is interacting with the page and how often by using Facebook Insights.
That’s enough for now. I left a short list of references below. As always, feel free to drop me a line if you have questions or if you want me to cover a certain topic.
Happy exploring!
Resources:
Facebook for Beginners Some of this info may be a little outdated, but it’s still a good general guide.
