How to Use Facebook: Tips for Newbies

So you’re ready to join the 750+ million people on Facebook? Great! There are a number of things you can do to make Facebook safer, control your privacy, find your friends, and customize your experience. Here are a few of the key things you should know.

Security

Make sure you’re using browser encryption. Go to Account Account Settings Settings Account Security. By choosing to “Browse Facebook on a secure connection (https) whenever possible” you’ll reduce the risk of someone stealing your password or eavesdropping on you over a wireless network. In the same settings window you’ll see options to notify you if an unrecognized computer or device tries to access your Facebook account. This is useful if you use one or two computers that access your account, but it may become a pain if you use random computers in many locations.

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Privacy

Facebook is about sharing with others, but you may not want to share everything with everyone. There are ways to determine who can see what by going to Account Privacy Settings. You can fully customize your privacy settings through Customize Settings so your data is shared only with a select group of people.

For each type of information you share, you can choose Everyone, Friends of Friends, Friends Only, or Customize. Customize allows you to choose specific people who can see your data, and allows you to hide your info from specific people as well.

Another part of being social is connecting, and Facebook allows you to determine how others can connect to you. In Account/Privacy Settings/Connecting on Facebook choose View settings to limit if people can search for you on Facebook, send you friend requests or messages, or see your friend list.

Friends

Facebook is no fun without your friends and family, so add as many of them as you’d like to be in touch with.

You’ll see a People You May Know section on the right side of your Facebook page, which is how Facebook suggests connections based on what it knows about you. Click See All and you’ll get a larger list. For a more directed search, click on Find Friends at the top of your screen. You’ll have the option to search for friends by name or by email, from other email accounts you own (Facebook recognizes over 2500 sources) or imported from a CSV file or Outlook.

If you’ve added people you no longer want on your Friends list, choose Account/Edit Friends. There’s a dropdown at the top of the page to choose which friends you’d like to view, and you can ‘X’ out any of them you’d like to remove.

The Account/Edit Friends page is also where you can create “Lists” to better organize your friends. You can create lists for high school friends, another for neighbors, others for work or your organizations, as many as you want. Just Create a List, and choose who you’d like to add.

Customization

Seeing lots of stuff you’d rather not in your News Feed? You can get rid of it! If you hover over an item in your feed, you’ll see a little ‘X’ appear in the upper right corner of the item. Click the “X” and choose “Hide this post” or “Hide all by xxx” and you can get rid of the stuff you’d rather not see.

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Most Small Business Facebook Page Fans Not Local

Francine Hardaway

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Every once in a while I get a press release and I use it as an excuse to write a blog post. Unfortunately, the company that send me this one, Roost, will probably not be pleased with what I’ve done with their report.

The Roost Local Scorecard, which was released today, is an analysis of the Facebook fan pages of  800 small businesses. What did it find? That only 15% of the average local small business’s “Likes” on Facebook are local. From that you can extrapolate that the Facebook pages of most small businesses do them little or no good for targeted marketing efforts.

This is one of those conclusions that — since its executive team comes from Flixter, WalMart, and Merchant Circle — Roost should have already known.

Because in the last decade I’ve worked with over 600 entrepreneurs and small businesses, I know how difficult it is to build a local community on a network as large as Facebook. I also know how little real knowledge most small business people have about social media. At best, it goes like this:

Small business puts up Facebook page

Page vendor or business owner tells everyone “go ask everyone to Like our page. We need 25 likes to claim our name.”

Someone from small business starts to post content to the page. Typically, either deals or product offerings.

Very few people who receive information about the deals go to the Facebook page.

Likers of the page who did it as a favor to their former classmates or their family members mute those irrelevant one-way deal posts in their streams, so Facebook’s curation eventually makes them disappear.

Business owner or marketing person looks more widely around her for potential people to “Like” the page.

Rinse and repeat, losing all the local people in an effort to get more “Likes.”

Change the wording to “Followers” and you have the typical Twitter behavior.

Why doesn’t this work? Because social media isn’t about platforms and dashboards, it’s about community and closeness. At its best, it’s about the butcher who asks you how your dog is doing on the raw food, or the nail salon that asks you if you want this broken nail repaired free while you wait for your pedicure. It’s about personalized service, neighborhood concerns, and the same bartender in the bar for twenty years.

Let’s take a farfetched example: let’s pretend my neighborhood sports bar set up a Facebook page. It would only invite people to the page who have already been to the bar more than once. The bartender himself would man the page, posting ball scores, special televised games, recipes for the chili you love in the bar, or news about someone from the neighborhood who had been in the hospital. You’d be invited to the page only if you were already a member of the community. So the bar would be targeting its existing customers and giving them reinforcement for their business. There would be “scarcity.” because you could only get invited into the page if you frequented the bar, so new customers might have an incentive to come back, and a community might form.

Bars are like that. Hair salon and barber shops have always been like that. Local restaurants are, and so are some car washes.  Bookstores, too. They are inherently social businesses.

But many businesses think they can just slap the bandaid of social media on their existing businesses, without realizing that for social media to be effective, social business has to be the real name of the game.

So if you  don’t plan for your business to be social through and through, and to build a community of your customers, don’t bother with a Facebook page.  Or a Roost platform to monitor it.

 

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