How to Organize your Facebook Page

*EDITED  – JUST ABOUT A WEEK AFTER THIS POST WAS WRITTEN, FACEBOOK CHANGED EVERYTHING!   OH, WELL…  😉

Hi friends~  It’s day 5 of our “snowed in, school’s out” vacation.  We live on the top of two hills and the bottom of two others, and our road is still completly white with ice and snow.  We spent the last two days “semi-unplugged”, doing our best to stay away from the computers, TVs, and electronic games unless we could hop on and hop off, or it was something we all could do together.  It has been a refreshing change for us, and I think that at this point, everyone’s love tank is full.   It’s a good feeling.

I have a question for you, and hopefully a little info that you might find helpful.

Do you Facebook?

If you do, and you have more than 50 friends on Facebook, does it bother you that it’s hard to keep up with all of the status updates? I may be weird, but it bothers me. My thought is that if we are really trying to stay connected with people (and not just collecting “friends”), we would actually want to be able to read and respond to what is going on in the lives of our FB friends.

I realize that, in the scope of life, this is not a big deal. But it bothered me until I discovered an answer to my FB dilemma. And since we bloggers can’t keep a good thing to ourselves, I feel an insatiable desire to share it with you.  🙂

My feelings toward FaceBook fluctuate from season to season. When my life was busy and overwhelming, FB was just one more thing I needed to keep current. Even though I loved knowing what my friends were fixing for dinner, it was information overload.

But now that I’m in a “slower pace” of life, I’m enjoying and appreciating the connections FB affords. Especially in thinking that we will soon be moving (still waiting with the Lord on that… no word or phone call yet), in faith, I’m organizing my FB page, preparing to stay caught up with my Nashville friends via FB.

When I entered the FB world, my original plan was to limit my number of friends to 50, thinking that I could reasonably keep up with the status updates of about fifty people. But because I love people, I just couldn’t turn down a friend request. Soon my 50 became 100, then 200, then 300, etc.

I always wondered how people like my “good friends” (ha ha) Travis Cottrell and Mary Beth Chapman kept up with the status updates of their personal friends when those updates could so easily get lost amidst the thousands of “fan/friends” (like me) they had. Then one day, Travis said something about putting people in his “friends” and “old friends” categories. It made me think and start looking around FB to find the solution.

Here is what I found, and how it has helped me.

This is a [rather fuzzy] picture of my FB home (not profile) page.

On the left, there are categories provided by FB: Friends, Status Updates, News Feeds, Pages, Photos, Links, etc. At the bottom of this list is the little blue word, “More”. If you click on “More”, an extended list will appear. At the bottom of that list, in blue lettering, are the words, “Create New List”.

I decided to organize my friends by how I originally knew them… From the places I’ve lived in, to the schools I’ve attended, to my family, and my current church. I even have a “blog/online friends” category.

Once you’ve created your lists and added some friends, you can decide which list you want to be your main group that pops up when you go to your FB homepage. To set your main group for your homepage, go to your homepage and click on the blue “More”. Then click and drag the category you want to always see first to the top of the entire list.

Then you can drag and arrange the other categories in the order you want to see them. When you have the categories where you want them, it will automatically save them for you.

I have a fluid category simply called “Friends” set to pop up when I go to my home page. This is where I keep around 50 people that are currently in my life or those I am praying for and don’t want to miss a single update. I move people in and out of this list as needed, and try to keep it small.

My next category is “Status Updates”. When I click on this box, everyone’s status updates, no matter which group they fall in, pops up on my screen. The benefit of using Status Updates is that you see people from every category.  The challenge is that unless you are on FB all of the time (which I am not), the updates pile on top of each other and many are missed.

After the “Status Updates,” my other groups are listed.

When I get a chance to check FB, I can quickly see those in my fluid “Friends” category because they pop up on my home page. Next, I click “Status Updates” to see what’s currently up with everyone else. Then, I start clicking down the line of categories. Because I have a small number of people in each category, it is easy to see what people have posted. In about 10 minutes, I can stay caught up on over 300 people that I truly care about.

*Once you have your categories set up, you can very easily move people in and out of those categories, or put people into more than one category. Go to your Profile Page and look under your “friends list” on the left of your page. Click on the blue number of friends that you have. All of your friends and groups will be pulled up in ABC order.

Notice how each of my friends are in a specific list? Some are in one, and some are in two. To add or change people from list to list, just click on the word “list” beside the person, then you can put them in the category that best fits.

Make sense? I sure do hope so…  If not, please chalk it up to a mushy brain from being snowed in for 5 days. 🙂

How about you… do you have your FB organized? Do you have a different method to share with us? How do you feel about FB?

And btw, … if you want to be friends, I’d be glad to be your friend… I now have just the place to keep up with you! 🙂

Love to each of you~
Jennifer

PS: Happy Groundhog Day! 🙂