(A Ready. Set. Share. contributing post on www.handmadeinpa.net)
Feel like you’re spending your life tracking down fellow artists or favorite sites onFacebook? Create Lists – a practice I already use in Twitter (where it’s called “Searches”) to get a quick overview of the chatter on specific topics or by specific groups. The idea, and knowledge, to do this on Facebook came to me today in a Social Media Examiner post shared by fellow communications pro, Carol Fingar. Social Media Examiner is a great site to follow for social media tidbits.
Creating Lists on Facebook is a good way to group Pages or Friends so you can take a quick look at their status updates without scrolling through your main news feed. It also helps ensure that you will see the post, since your main news feed uses Facebook’s mysterious algorithm to populate your news feed.
If you’re like me and have clients or customers related to a specific region or topic, you can sort those folks out as well. To keep my sources for generating stories related to the PA Wilds together, I created a list to include the following folks:
• Olga Gallery, Café & Bistro
• Yorkholo Brewing Company
• Revitalize Mansfield
• Curt Weinhold Photography
• Pennsylvania Wilds Artisan Trails
• Flemish House Art Gallery
• ECCOTA
And if you have Friends and Pages that you want on one list – you can do that too! Just create the list from Friends and then add Pages, or vice versa. There is also an option in the top right of the list page to add individual Friends or Pages, rather than choosing from a list. Also in the top right corner of the List page, you can manage your list by adding/removing friends/pages, deleting the list, renaming the list, and even choosing which types of status updates are shown on the list.
And don’t worry, you’ll still have your normal news feed!
If you think you may ever want to send a Facebook email to all the friends on a given list, you should keep your lists to a maximum of twenty people – which is the maximum number of people who can be sent a message at the same time.
http://anothermonkey.blogspot.com/2011/05/why-you-should-break-up-your-facebook.html
In my case I have all of my Sideshow friends on a list called “Sideshow Friends,” and then I also have them broken up into “Sideshow A,” “Sideshow B,” etc. So each person is on (at least) two lists – one for seeing their posts, and one for contacting them if the need ever arises again.