Why use Facebook for work?

Lots of your beat contacts, local institutions, competition and local brands are on Facebook right now – and the audience is only growing.

Facebook terms you should understand:

Profile - A profile is the home base for your individual Facebook account. Only regular (non-corporate) users can have a Facebook profile.

Page - Facebook also has pages (sometimes called Fan pages) for companies, groups, non-profits, celebrities and dozens of other institutions. It has some different features than a profile. The Enquirer has a Facebook Business page: http://news.cincinnati.com/enqfacebook

Group – There are thousands of Facebook groups. This in an inter-connected group of Facebook users around a common purpose. Groups have discussions boards, can share photos, videos and more. They range from groups for work organizations to fan groups for TV shows. You may choose to start a group for your family or for a group of sources to share information.

Status updates - This is similar to Twitter, a sort of “What are you doing”. It usually starts with YourName is ________. This goes into your public wall and news feed and the news feed of other people.

Newsfeed - This is what people join Facebook for. This is the stream of activity from your contacts on Facebook – their status updates, added photos, shared links and more. This is how a growing number of people – especially young people – get their news.

Wall – This is your own personal newsfeed – all of your added friends, comments you’ve left on other pages, shared links, added photos and more. Other people can also comment on whatever shows up here. This information is shared outwardly to other people on their newsfeeds. You can specify what your profile submits to your friends’ news feeds using the privacy settings (see below).

Friends or Friending - Anyone who “friends” you on Facebook you are giving permission to access your Profile.

Applications – These are add-ons people have built to make your Facebook profile more useful or fun. These can be games, additions to your profile to tell people something about you or useful tools to enhance your profile or use offline. If you want, try searching Facebook for something you like – anything – and see what comes up under the Applications tab.

Invites – You’ll get emails if a friend has invited you to use an Application they like. These are usually causes they care about, a game they’re taking part in or some other Facebook contest. Much like a chain letter, these apps are designed only to get as many people added as possible, so every time you accept one of these application invites, it’ll ask you to invite others (hit “skip” if you don’t want to).

“Tagging” - Friends can “tag” you in a photo, video or note, which means they have publicly noted your profile in relation to whatever they “tagged”. This will place a link to that photo, note or video into your news feed where anyone can see it. You might not want this to happen (see privacy settings below).

Setting Up Your Facebook Privacy Settings

You can use your Facebook account for both work and your personal life by utilizing Facebook’s customizable privacy settings.

Q: Why make different privacy settings for different kinds of contacts?

A: You don’t have to, of course, but it’s highly recommended if you use Facebook personally and professionally. You may not want your sources or coworkers to see your vacation photos you put on Facebook to show your sister.

Sorting your contacts

The first thing you want to do is group your Facebook contacts into lists – you can have as many as you want and people can go into multiple groups. You may choose to have separate lists for Friends, Family and Work Connections, for instance.

1.    Log in to Facebook and click on Friends in the top blue menu bar.
2.    Along the left side click on Make new list
3.    Name the list (do a “Work” list first) and hit ENTER
4.    On the next screen, you can select who you want to put into this list. If you know everyone off the top of your head, you can choose them individually by typing in the first few letters of their name.
OR
5.    If you’d like to go through all of your friends and select many at a time to add to this group, click Select multiple friends.
6.    Click on the friend’s photo to add them to this list.
7.    When you are satisfied, click Save List at the bottom of the screen.

You can repeat this for more lists if you’d like.

For Friends added after this point:

When you click on the Add me as a Friend button on a new friend request, there’s a dropdown menu that appears that allows you to select a group to put that friend into. You can also go back to your Friends page and edit the groups after the fact if you need to.

To set your privacy settings:

1.    Log in to your Facebook account. Hover over Settings in the top blue menu bar and scroll to click on Privacy Settings.
2.    First, click on Profile.
3.    On this screen you can set how individual users or groups of users can see your Facebook profile. Here’s what the menu options mean:
a.    Everyone – Literally anyone who searches for you can see this in Facebook
b.    Only Friends – Only people who are current friends can see this
c.    My Networks and Friends – Your friends and any networks (say, Cincinnati or Gannett, if you’re in those networks) can see this
d.    Friends of Friends – Your friends and anyone they are friends with can see this
e.    Customize – Choose this option to set specific people or groups who can or can’t see the selected item
4.    If you select Customize, here’s how you can make it so a certain group can’t view the selected part of your profile. For this example, let’s say you don’t want your work group to see photos tagged of you:
a.    Select Customize under Photos Tagged of You
b.    Select Only Friends
c.    If you wish, select some or all of your networks who can see it our of the drop-down
d.    Under Except These People, begin typing the name of specific people or the name of your work list of friends to block those users from seeing Photos Tagged of You
e.    Click Okay.
f.    At any point you can return to the top section of this page and see how a certain friend sees your profile. At the top of the screen is a box – start typing in a friends name and it can show you that friend’s view of your page. This is a good test to see how the privacy settings work (check how a friend in your Work group sees your profile).
5.    Other than the main tab here, there’s a Contact Information tab where you can select who can see your various means of contact you have registered on Facebook.
6.    When you are done making all of your changes on the Profile section, click Save at the bottom of the screen.

Back on the Privacy Settings Overview page, you can also set how people can search for you, what sort of information shows up in your News Feed and Wall and what information you want shared with Facebook Applications.

Editing More Privacy Settings

You can also edit who can see certain things you’ve added to your own profile like your own photos, videos, events, status updates and applications. To do this:

1.    Log in to your Facebook account. Hover over Settings in the top blue menu bar and scroll to click on Application Settings.
2.    On this screen you can see all of your added Applications, including a few built into every profile like Events, Photos and Links.
3.    For this example, click Edit Settings on the Photos line.
a.    Under the Wall tab, you can specify how you want this application to publish your actions to your Wall (and thus, your news feed on friends’ pages)
b.    Under Profile, you can specify who can view your photos. Much like in Privacy settings, it is here you can customize certain people or entire groups who can’t see the photos you’ve posted.
c.    The bookmark tab creates a bookmark for this application on your Home page.
d.    The Additional Permissions tab specifies how often you wish to receive emails regarding this application.

4.    When you are finished editing a particular application’s settings, click Okay.
5.    To see more applications to edit their settings, there’s a drop-down menu in the top-right. Choose Authorized to see all of the applications you have approved for your profile in alphabetical order.

Sharing content on Facebook

Facebook is the third-biggest provider of traffic to our site because of people who submit our stories into their news feeds. If you want to be sure to get people you know on Facebook to your work published on our site or on social network sites, you should share it in your news feed.

To share a link to a story or other online content:

1.    On your profile or home page, there’s an area with your photo that says, “What’s on your mind?” Click inside of the empty text box there and it will give you options to post a link, photo, music or video.

2.    Click on link. In the box that appears, paste the link to your story, photo gallery, interactive, etc. Click Attach.

3.    Facebook will generate how the link will look in your outgoing news feed. You can’t really change the text it selects, but you may have option with photo thumbnails. If it shows you an image, try to click through the image options to see which you like best.

4.    Add some context to the link if you like by adding some text in the box above, such as “Here’s my story on XX, you’ll also find it in Sunday’s Enquirer.”

5.    Click Share.

To add your blog to your Facebook profile page:

If you go through this process one time, you will never have to tell your Facebook friends about your blog entries – it will happen automatically.

1.    In the top right of your screen, click in the search box and type Social RSS. A lot of stuff will come up, but at our near the top there should be an application with this name.
2.    Click on View Application.
3.    From the application’s page, click on Add to My Profile (or whatever it says to that effect). Approve all necessary permissions.
4.    Find the application’s settings. If they aren’t readily found under your Boxes tab on your profile page, an easy way to get back to them is to search as in #1 for the application, it should take you right to its settings page.
5.    On the settings page, fill out the description for your blog and the URL.
6.    Below that is a series of boxes, you’ll fill out one line of boxes per blog.
a.    Under Tag, put three letters to serve as short-hand for your blog’s name
b.    Under Title, put the title of your blog
c.    Under URL, you’ll need to paste in the URL of your blog’s RSS feed. If you don’t know where your RSS feed is on your blog, look for the icon that looks like this:  . Right click on it and go to “copy link”. In the URL box, paste that link using Cntrl-V.
d.    Leave alternative link box blank.
e.    Under refresh, select 30 minutes or an hour, depending on how often you want Facebook to check for new blog posts from you.
f.    Click Update below the box

7.    Go to the next tab along the top of the box – Display Options.
a.    For number of items to display – pick how many recent blog headlines you want out there. My suggestion would be 5.
b.    Under description, select Full Description.
c.    Under items, select first item open.
d.    Under date, select yes.
e.    Under time zone, select New York.
f.    Under Share, select yes.
g.    Click Update.
8.    Go to the next tab – Newsfeeds. Here you can specify if you want something put into your outgoing news feed to your friends every time you post a blog entry. If so, select yes for both options. Be sure, if it asks, to rant permission to publish short story sizes.
9.    Click on Add to Profile below the box. Select add to Wall and Profile Tab.

You can add more than one blog or RSS feed if you’d like. If you have an additional blog or a column on our site, you can add an RSS feed from that as well by following steps 6-8, using another line under each tab on the settings page.

To add your Twitter updates to your Facebook profile page:

There are several ways to go about doing this, but I’ll only outline two here.

One option is to have your Twitter post to Facebook as your status message. This shows up at the top of your profile and in your news feed. You could have it do this with every tweet you make, or you can specify certain tweets to have go to Facebook.

To have every tweet update your Facebook page (not recommended)

1.    Search for the application for Twitter in the search box.
2.    Select it and add it to your page. Give it all permissions and Twitter sign-in info it wants.
3.    Somewhere in the application settings (it depends on which application you use), it should give you an option to “Allow Twitter to update your Facebook status”. Allow it.
4.    You can change how Twitter posts to Facebook by clicking on Setting > Application Settings in the blue bar along the top of the screen.

To have only certain tweets post to your Facebook page

1.    Search for the application Selective Twitter Status
2.    Select it and add it to your page. Give it all permissions and Twitter sign-in info it wants.
3.    When you want the tweet to show up on Facebook, add #fb at the end of your tweet.

** You can also do selective updates to your Facebook status if you use the Twitter desktop application Tweetdeck.

Add feeds from Digg, Delicious, Flickr, Photobucket and other sites:

On your Profile page, look below the box where you update your status and share links. There’s a link with a gear that says Settings.

Click it and you’ll go to a page where you can choose which applications you want to post to your news feed. If you have an account at any of those sites, select it and enter your account name.

Your activity on these sites will now be broadcast to your newsfeed and your friends.  This is very handy if you frequently save work-related links or stories to a site like Delicious – it will double-post them to your Facebook.

© Mandy Jenkins Copyright 2009