A Facebook Manual (for Aunt Kiefie)

The fundamental principle for using Facebook successfully is knowing its purpose. Facebook is simply a way for you to entertain your friends and acquaintances. Remember that it’s more for them than for you, and everything else I tell you will follow naturally.

Messaging is your key means of communication if you want to say something to one person. Your dance friends probably don’t care that you congratulate somebody on the arrival of their grandchild, but that grandmother cares a lot. Send Grandma a private message.

Wall Posts are available to the general public, but Facebook doesn’t automatically show all of our posts to all of your friends. It will show a new post first to a few people who seem especially interested in you, people who read most of your recent posts already. It may also show a post about lemonade to your other friends who post about lemonade, but don’t imagine that everybody is going to see a new post right away. But if those first friends like your post and/or comment on it, then Facebook will begin showing that one to more people.

Since wall posts are public and you probably have a diverse group of friends, you should be judicious about what you put there. If something is interesting only to a subset of your friends, you’d be better off posting it in a group that you all belong to, so it won’t get broadcast to people who aren’t interested. You can even create a group for that special set of friends, if there isn’t one already.

Try to be sensitive about the volume of your wall posts. [This isn’t relevant to Aunt Kiefie, who posts only seldom.] Since your close friends will see every one of your posts in their feed, they might feel overwhelmed and change the settings so they see only “important” posts from you. Or, worst case, they might “unfollow” you. If you want to entertain a lot of people, you need to be judicious about it and post only stuff that a lot of people will want to read about. [And I should take my own advice.]

Comments on posts are a little more private than the posts themselves, because people have to do a little work to see them. This is a good place to put your reaction to the post, and it’s probably even OK sometimes if your reaction is, “Wow, Annie, I haven’t seen you in a long time!” If, however, you want to invite Annie to lunch, you should consider taking that back to Messaging.

Replies to comments are almost private, because only the person whose comment elicited the reply will see what you said without clicking on something. Be as personal as you want there, and that would even be an OK place to invite Annie to lunch if you’re replying to her comment that she hasn’t seen you in a long time.

Naming names helps to make sure that certain people see a post. If you mention somebody in a post or in a comment, Facebook will definitely bring that to their attention. You can also tag people in a post, but it’s generally not cool to tag an inanimate object with a person’s name unless that person gave the object to you or will relate very strongly to it.

Posting on somebody else’s wall is very problematic. You can do it, but remember that it’s a Wall Post, and everybody gets a chance to see it. Your friend may be uncomfortable about presenting your conversation about lunch plans to the whole world. Your friend may even be uncomfortable about advertising your passion for oatmeal cookies. The only time you should post on a friend’s wall is when you are confident that your post will be interesting to your friend’s friends, because basically you’re taking control of their space.

If somebody else, like your nephew Steve in Belarus, puts something on your wall and you don’t want it there, feel free to delete it. It’s your wall.

Now that you’re good at all this stuff, you’ll be able to entertain your friends and acquaintances successfully and get a lot of “likes.” That’s fun, of course, but since you remember that your primary focus is on entertaining them, rather than yourself, you don’t need to count the “likes” several times a day. Just check often enough to learn what kinds of things are especially entertaining for your friends, and stick with real life. If you don’t actually live your life, you won’t have anything to say on Facebook!