How to Organize Your Facebook Friends

Aug 30, 2010 by mandeewidrick

So you’re becoming fairly popular on Facebook. People are adding you as a friend left and right. Yipee! Hold up. You’re justnow beginning to realize that you’re adding bunches of people and increasing your numbers, but you’re not building on personal relationships with those folks. Uh oh.

I ran into this problem myself not too long ago. As I started increasing my online following, I began adding more and more people to my Facebook profile, and it got hard to remember who was who. That’s when I discovered Facebook lists.

What are Friend Lists, and how do I create them?

Friend Lists are a way to organize your list of friends on Facebook and to target privacy settings. You can also filter your view of each list’s stream of activity separately on the home page.

To create and customize your own Friend Lists, please follow these steps:

1. Go to the Friends page. Clicking the Account drop-down at the top of any page, and then click on “Edit Friends.”
2. Click the Create New List button at the top of the page to create a new list, or type the name of a friend in the left-side search field to add a friend to an existing list. You can also click on an existing Friend List on the left-side of the page, and then click on the Edit List button.

If you have more than two Friend Lists, you can easily add or remove friends from lists by using the drop-down menu that appears next to their names on the “All Friends” tab of the Friends page.

For example, I have some of the following lists:

• Locals – People that live within a 1 hour radius of myself
• Horse People - I usually direct these people to my Horse Family page
• TSA - Tribe Syndication Association members
• The Newbies - Folks I just added within the past week
• Still Kinda New - Fairly new friends, these people get moved from “The Newbies” to here
• Good Friends - People I’m pretty close to

Another fun feature of Facebook Lists is that I can update my privacy settings with each list.

How can I use Friend Lists to help control my privacy?

You can use Friend Lists to create different privacy levels for different groups of your friends. This allows you to selectively open more of your profile to the people closest to you.

When you edit your Privacy Settings, clicking “Customize” for any setting will open a Custom Privacy pop up dialogue. Under “Make this open to,” select “Specific People” form the drop-down menu and enter the name of the Friend List with whom you’d like to share the content.

If you add a user to more than one Friend List, and those Friend Lists have conflicting privacy settings, the more restrictive of the privacy settings will always be respected.

If you enter three or more friends as an exception, you’ll have the option to create a new Friend List to group these people. You can create, edit and delete Friend Lists from your Edit Friends page.

Now I’m going to be completely honest here. I don’t want to sign into my Facebook chat and be available to over 1,000 people all the time. I like making those personal connections, but there are at times those people who don’t really need anything and just want to chew the fat with you. I don’t mind this once in a while but I typically I don’t have time for that. I found an easy solution by creating a “Good Friends” list where I only have the people that I want to talk to often. When I log into chat, I only make myself visible to that list, which prevents everybody else that’s not on that list from seeing that I’m online. Nifty, huh?!

One last tip you may find handy….

How do I message all members of a Friend List?

To send a message to a Friend List from your Inbox, select the “Compose” button and enter the name of your Friend List into the “To” field. Since the maximum number of recipients is always 20, you will not be able to send a message to any Friend List that contains over 20 people.

When you send a message to a Friend List, the message will show all the recipients’ names, but the title of your Friend List will never be visible to other members of Facebook.

I actually had no idea you could do that until this morning. I found it while browsing through the help topics about Friend Lists. It appears to be a pretty cool feature!

Now that you know how to create lists and organize them to your advantage, you should be well on your way to establishing solid relationships and friendships on Facebook.