Choosing friends out of a crowd. One of the most difficult things about building a large network on facebook, is actually keeping up with close personal friends; particularly when it comes to sharing.
Whenever you look at a friend’s profile, you have the ‘friend’ button at the upper-right of their page. When clicked, a drop-down appears where you can add them to a list. This serves useful purposes – particularly when you’re looking at your home feed with everyone’s updates flying by.
At the right side of your home page there is the option of choosing a List view based upon your friend lists that you’ve created. Additionally, when posting updates to your own wall, you may choose to post something to a specific group of people, or exclude a specific group of people; not so much as being evasive, but instead being considerate of the noise we generate when we post irrelevant topics.
It’s about becoming more targeted.
Now the real good news: Take a look at the screen image and you’ll also notice at the top “Close Friends” and “Acquaintances” which gives you even more personal control. Sometimes, when you post something – you don’t because you realize your audience is too vast and too wide. Yet, you wish you could share something very intimate with your closest audience.
Now’s your chance.
This additional choice option allows you to specifically identify – regardless of the list they’re on – whether you have a close relationship with this person, or whether they’re just another acquaintance that you met through networking.
Post Closer to Home
Now when you post something that is more personal for the general audience, you simply change the option for who can see your post to your “Close Friends” and keep it intimate.
Public means the whole world will see it – a nice thing to do with some generic things that help decorate the look and feel of your profile page.
Friends, just the people in your personal facebook network will see the post.
Friends except Acquaintances is this new wonderful jewel, that will filter out friends you’ve tagged as Acquaintances, allowing only those you identified as “Close Friends” to see your post.
Only Me is a great feature too. Consider wanting to bookmark something for later reference. Now you can post it to yourself here on your facebook profile and no one else will see it.
And Custom is where you can get into some finessing even further, using Lists, and even individual’s names.
Seeing your friend list grow to large numbers can be fun, exciting, and rewarding. It can also get very noisy! Viewing your HomeFeed, status updates, videos, photos, and links zip by at alarming rates of change, and you rarely get a full view of what is really going on in your own community. Here’s the good news: You can quiet the noise. And it doesn’t mean you have to ‘unfriend’ all those people in your network either.
My wall is already wide-open for everyone to see. It’s part of the game-plan. With business services, my artwork and writing, photography, and friends, not to mention clients, having my Wall accessible to visitors, and even open to their comments at times, permits a wider-reach and conversation for relationships to develop. This is why I keep it viewable.