For many people the use of Facebook revolves around the management of their personal Facebook ‘Profile’. This is the area of Facebook that’s allocated to you personally when you set up your Facebook account and Facebook rules state that each of us should only have 1 Profile. Although we are only allowed one personal, individual ‘Profile’, many of us will also set up a ‘Page’ which is an area on Facebook we can use for business. For many people however their personal and business lives are connected in many areas by certain people, groups and organisations, and there is no good reason why the personal ‘Profile’ can’t be made good use on in enhancing communications in both the personal and business areas of our lives. Although technically a ‘Profile’ shouldn’t be operated for monetary gain, the reality is that it can be used as something which contributes to this in indirectly through valuable crossover communications

Profile Pages

Facebook Profiles are typically our communication centres and contain our personal information at the top of the page, photos and messages. The Profile will also be distinguishable by the lists of ‘Friends’ shown on the left hand side. Although we may know plenty of people listed as ‘Friends’ there are likely to be many people listed here who are purely the result of a general perceived need and practice on Facebook of networking.

Communication

If you have a ‘Page’ for business, it’s worth displaying this (as a link) at the top of your Profile page in the “Works At” section. In most cases this can be achieved by clicking on ‘Edit Profile’, then clicking on ‘Education and Work’, and in the ‘Employer’ section selecting the page you want to link to.

Depending on how you manage who sees what on your page using your privacy settings e.g. which lists sees which messages, you can use your Profile to communicate to different groups in different ways. This means that although your Profile is essentially personal, you can still use Facebook Friends Lists to communicate and interact with friends related to your business life thus giving you maximum leverage.

Communicating Using Friends Lists

One first thing to remember about communicating using lists is that you can either communicate privately to a certain list or you can create a ‘Featured List’. The communication to people on a ‘Featured List’ can be seen by all visitors to your Profile whereas communication to a specific private list you create can only be seen by people on that particular private list.

Private Lists

To manage communications with different groups privately from eachother e.g. your business ‘Friends’ you can first segment them into appropriate groups by setting up lists from them via you Profile and communicating independently with each group. To set up a specific list of ‘Friends’ click on the ‘Friends’ link on your Profile. Next click on ‘Edit Friends’ and then click on ‘Create List’. To help you distinguish between the different lists of friends you create, at this point you can give a name (which will only be displayed to you) to the list you’re creating – rather like giving a name to a folder for a group of emails. If you have a lot of friends on your Facebook Profile, to save you scrolling through them all to find the friends to add to the list just type their name in the search box (top right – of the friends list window). Either way, scrolling or using the search box, once their profile link appears click on it in order to tick their box – thus selecting them to be added to your list.

You can then send a message to this private list group by returning to your Profile, typing the required message into the horizontal ‘Share’ field. You then click on the drop-down ‘Everyone’ menu, click ‘customise, click ‘Specific People’, and start typing in the name of the private group – the predictive aspect of this setting should then select the correct group name for you. You then type in ‘Save Setting’ and click ‘Share’ to send the message to that group.

This level of segmentation and privacy can be extended to having photo albums, videos and other content which are only visible to the specified list people.

Featured Lists

Creating a Featured List means that not only will all visitors to your Profile be able to see your communications to them, but the people you add to this list will be informed that they are on there (because of the privacy implications).

The list you are publicly associated with are shown on the left hand side of your Facebook Profile, and can in themselves help to manage perceptions of you by showing which groups you are involved with. To create the Featured List click on ‘Edit profile’ (top right) and ‘Featured People’ (menu – top left). There you will see links to the ‘Featured Friends’ Lists that you already have. You have the option here to ‘Create New List’ or ‘Add An Existing List or Group’. From here you create the list in a similar way to the private list.

Chat

Further communication with your various segmented lists – business and personal – can be enhanced by the ability to chat – see the Facebook Chat area in the right hand corner of the Profile. A pop up list of your many groups / publics can be used to help manage this and just as individuals on Skype can see when you log in and log out, you can inform different groups when you are on or offline.

A Facebook Profile can therefore be used alongside a business Page to communicate with business associates where the 2 crossover as personal ‘Friends’.