Tech Time: Facebook Expert

In less than a decade, Facebook has become almost ubiquitous to social human communication in the developed countries and is challenging traditional business communications as well. Yet, there are some Facebook holdouts and worse, passive Facebook users that do not harness the full potential of medium.

Master the Zuckerberg brainchild with this first round of tips:

Selectively Hide Status Updates

Moms and bosses may not be friends in real life, but as online friends, they have access to your most personal status updates if you do not carefully tweak your privacy settings. Click on Account Settings, then Customise and under “Posts by Me”, limit who can and can’t see that you are having a bad day.

Link Up With Friends

Expand the “range of your posts” and get your friends involved by tagging them in your posts. Much like Twitter, bring up the “@” sign in the update and a self populated list will popup allowing your to select the friends, pages or events you wish to tag. Visitors you’re your profile can then instantly hyperlink to your tagged friends AND your post automatically appears in their timeline.

Icon Up

It’s hard to believe that Facebook does not automatically convert :) into the corresponding ☺ smiley. If you’re a geek, that won’t bother you at all, simply hold down the ALT key while keying in the corresponding number sequence for the emoticon you wish to share. If that’s too much effort, just copy and past the desired symbol from: http://copypastecharacter.com/ or http://facebook-symbols.com/characters/ into your post.

Block Bad News

By default, Facebook’s News Feed filters Top News, posts that receive the most likes, comments or from profiles/pages your interact with the most including stuff from people you would rather not see. Take control of the News Feed by clicking Most Recent, then Edit Options to hide posts from profiles or pages that have become an annoyance to you. No need to un-friend or un-like; this option just quietly prevents their rubbish from cluttering your stream and no one has to know.

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