New Media Primer: Facebook

**UPDATE TO THIS POST: If you want to see the amazing power of a strong social network in action, check out this group and this group on Facebook.  A young lady at our church got rushed to the hospital a couple of days ago with cranial bleeding.  These pages show how prayer and information can move around very quickly in the new media.  Please pray for Katherine and her family.**

The last couple of posts have been dedicated to starting a blog and following others that blog. We're going to move past blogging now to another platform that is even more interactive than blogging: Facebook.

Most of you have probably heard of Facebook, many of you actually use it.  So what is this medium of communication all about?  Well, if blogging is a roundtable discussion after a lecture, Facebook is like a scrapbooking party with friends and family.  With Facebook you can share pictures, videos, links to blogs and play games.  It's more interactive in the way that you can see and interact with what your friends are doing, but it's also a semi-private venture. Unlike blogging, not everybody can see your information on Facebook.  For that to happen, you must become "friends".  Here is what you need to do to get setup with Facebook.

Step 1: Create an Account

Go to www.facebook.com and set up your account.  This may take a little more time than setting up your blog because it's going to ask you for more information. You don't have to fill out everything right now, but you should put down information that will help others find you, like where you went to high school and college.  The more info you fill out, the happier your new "friends" will be.  You will notice that I keep putting "friends" in quotation marks...I'll stop doing that now, but you may find that eventually people will add you as a friend on Facebook that you do not even know!  These are usually friends of friends.

Step 2: Upload Content

Before you go public with your new profile by letting people know you have it, you need to add some content.  One of the key things is your profile picture.  It drives me crazy when somebody has an FB account but doesn't put a profile pic into it.  You can see from the screenshot of my FB page that you can have some fun with your picture...I have opted for the Matt Singley bobblehead to represent me. A striking likeness, I must say! You can also create photo and video albums for sharing these things with your friends, just look in your left navigation bar for an icon called "photos".  Once you click that you can find the area that will allow you to upload pics and videos.

Step 3: Add Friends

There are many ways to add friends to your Facebook account.  Unlike other things on the internet, nobody can see your profile unless you add them as a friend (unless they are in your network already), and you can't just add friends as you wish...you need to request them.  They will get the request and either approve or disapprove you as a friend. You can go to my profile and add me by clicking here. One way to find friends is to go to the Friend Finder page and submit their email address.  If they are on FB it will show their profile. You can also go to the general search page and search by high school or college (by year as well within these) or by company.  Just keep plugging away, you'll find your friends!

Step 4: Interact

The header (the top of the page) gives you several options.  If you click on "Facebook" in the upper left corner you will be taken to the public timeline.  This is the place where you can see what your friends are up to.  Facebook will pull events and actions from your friends and put them here for you to see.  Among other things, you will notice that your friend's birthdays are linked on the right side.  So when one of my FB friends is celebrating a birthday it's easy enough for me to go to their profile page and write on their wall.  Which brings us to interactivity with things like, "The Wall"

The Wall is a public area within each person's profile that allows you to write messages to each other.  I can go to my friends wall and write something like, "Hey, I missed you at the concert the other night, hope you are okay".  They (along with the rest of the people that are friends with my friend) can see this message.  He can then reply on my wall, or he can send me a private message.

Below each person's profile picture is an area that says "Send (your friend's name) a Message".  This is an area for private messages, they are only seen by the person you are sending them to.  This is a great feature for things that are a little more private in nature.

Step 5: Participate

Facebook has several different ways of connecting with other people in large or small groups. One way is an event page.  Events are usually one-time occurrences that you can be invited to, or if you are the one putting on the event, you can invite others. For example, my friend TJ is hosting a music gig next month, so he created this event page.  This way he can send us information, keep track of who is coming and who isn't, and market the event.  Another thing you can join is a group.  This page shows you what Bel Air Pres does for the church group.

Creating an event or a group is a great way to keep in touch and send information to many people quickly and easily.  For example, my friend Syd has set up a group to pray for a woman from our church that is really sick and in the hospital for brain surgery as I type this.  I appreciate that I can check in and get updates so easily, without expecting Syd to call everybody on the list.  In this way Facebook is making our church community feel smaller and very close to one another.

Step 6: Play

As great as Facebook is for keeping track of friends, it's also a good place to play with them!  I think the most popular application for gaming on Facebook is Scrabulous.  I know many Scrabulous addicts, they just can't seem to get enough.  You can start a Scrabulous game within your Facebook account, but I must warn you...once you start it's hard to stop. There are many other games and activites on Facebook that you can explore, but I tend not to pursue them a lot.  Can you say "productivity killer"?

That's about it!  Of course there is more to Facebook than what I have written here, but this should be enough to get you started.  Don't forget to add me as a friend! Oh, and if I'm leaving out anything that you think is worthy of mentioning, please put it in the comments section of this post so we can all see it.

The next New Media primer post that I write will be about one of my favorite social networks: Twitter!

Comments

[rachel from the blog]

Matt...while I appreciate the information, I can't help but think that this is some elaborate ploy for more Facebook friends. haha. You might have won the battle but I have plans for the war. No really, this is great stuff. I have missed your posts! Looking forward to learning about Twitter and how it will change my life:-)

[Rhett Smith]

preaching to the choir...love it! great posts.