Facebook Lists | Nicky Kriel | Social Media Coach & Trainer

Facebook Lists needn't be a chore

Are you using Lists on Facebook yet?

Lists have always been on Facebook as a way of grouping people, but now Facebook have made it more obvious that they are there.

So if you are not using them yet, maybe it is time to start. If you want to know why it is a good idea, read this: Facebook: Why you should your friends in lists .

I thought maybe, I could inspired you with three creative ways to use list.

But first, I thought I would show you around Facebook lists.

1. Avoid Top News, the Ticker and Adverts

This idea was inspired by a wonderful post by Sott Ayers of Bubze How to never see the Facebook Ticker or Top Stories (His video is well worth watching too!)
Did you know that Facebook allows you have control over what you see in your News Feed? If the Ticker is annoying you and you don’t like seeing ads, you get rid of them completely by filtering your News Feed by using lists.

The advantage of doing this is that

you can filtering want you want to see in the best way for you.
you see the news that is important to you in strict reverse chronological order
you can focus on your Close Friends or Family if time is tight and you don’t want to miss anything important.
No advertisements
No ticker distracting you
No Top News cluttering your recent stories

2. Curate information for your Facebook Page or Blog

I read a lot about Social Media, so I have friended Social Media people and have liked Pages that are great sources of content. Lists are a great way to find content to share. Here is what you do.

Subscribe to people who are thought leaders in your field
Like Pages that are relevant to your business
See which of your friends do a similar thing to you
Create a list with all your sources of content
When you need inspiration or good quality content to share, click on the list
Your News Feed is transformed into your very own library

3. Stop People from seeing that you are available on chat

If you like being available for chat on Facebook, but…

certain people keep on popping up to chat to all the time
or you don’t want to be available to a particular person

here’s how you do it.

Create a list for those people and give it a suitable name e.g. Block
Go to the chat bar and choose the Settings option

Choose limit availability

Choose “make me unavailable”
tick the list

Alternatively, you could make yourself only available to particular lists of people.

Let me know if you have started using lists recently. What do you use them for?

Nicky Kriel

Nicky Kriel is a Social Media Coach & Trainer inspiring, educating and empowering Business Owners to use Social Media more strategically. She is also the author of How to Twitter for Business Success. For more information visit http://www.nickykriel.com or to find out about her courses that she runs in Guildford visit http://www.nickykriel.com/courses

1. Top News

This is created by an Algorithm based on various factors like,

how many interactions you have with that person or page
how many comments or likes the post has received
how recent the post was

This is great in theory. It would be easy to be overwhelmed by all the news, but no mathematical equation will know

that I don’t interact with my children’s posts and they don’t interact with mine, but I do want to see what they are saying.
that I do want to know what is happening in my friends lives even though I don’t always comment on their posts
and I want to read the content posted on Pages that I have liked

2. Most Recent

In theory, you would think that this would show all the posts from your friends and pages in reverse chronical order, but did you know that it is not the case?

The default on most people’s feed is set to “friends and pages that you interact with the most”.
Many posts are collapsed if they have been posted by a third party application like Twitter, SocialOomph or NetworkedBlogs. I wrote about this recently 3 Great Reasons to Post Manually on Facebook.

Now I would like introduce you to a little arrow that I had never noticed before. It is next to “Most Recent” Have you used it?

When you click on the arrow, you get a drop box which allow you to filter your news stream and at the bottom is a little button. The “Edit Options” button will give you the following options.

Select the All your friends and pages option if you want to choose which posts you want to see.

From the Drop Down menu, you can see that you can actually filter your news stream so that you can just see

Status Updates
Games
Links
Pages
Questions

Below that you can filter by the list you have created. In this way, you can cut out all the unnecessary noise and just focus on the friends or pages you choose.

You can put your friends or pages into lists. So you may, for example, want to see the posts of particular Pages you have liked. To create a list is easy.

Click on Account

Select “Edit Friends”

Choose the “Create a list” button
Choose a name for the Pages eg. Top Pages
start typing the names of the Page and it will pop into the options you can select.
This way you can filter your News Feed when you only want to catch up the news that is most important to you.

Did you know that you could create Lists of Pages? I knew about creating lists of friends, but not Pages. Have you learnt something new, too?

Nicky Kriel | Social Media Coach & Trainer | Social Media for Business

Inspiring you to grow your business through Social Media

Tag Archives: Facebook Lists