This article has been re-published with permission of MakeUseOf.
By: Angela Alcorn
It’s Facebook. You use it every day, and yet it changes something every other week. Are you completely sure you know all of the most useful tricks to make it manageable?
On the off-chance that you missed something out of the zillion changes Facebook made in the past year or so, here are the ultimate tricks you absolutely need to know about.
Clean Up Your News Feed
Honestly, this might seem basic to some of you, but other people still don’t get it and complain about how Facebook is unbearable. It doesn’t have to be that way.
There are two vital elements to cleaning up your news feed:
- Make a custom friends list for just the people you want to see updates from.
- Hide notifications from apps you don’t care about.
Follow the links for detailed instructions. I’d also advocate bookmarking the link for your favorite friends list and only ever browsing Facebook with that link.
Another thing to set up is your News Feed preferences. Head to your news feed, then hover over the News Feed link on the left and click on the settings cog that comes up. From there you can adjust who is most important to you and their updates will appear first when you’re browsing your feed.
Plus, there is one other important tip that’s great for clearing up your feed, which we’ll get to later.
Set Up a Legacy Contact
In some countries, it’s now possible to delegate who gets to manage your Facebook account after you die. Go to your Facebook settings to set up your Facebook legacy contact. If it’s available to you, you’ll see “Legacy Contact” right there.
They will only have limited powers and will need to verify you are in fact dead before they get access, but at least your account will be in the right hands.
Share a Facebook Album
Far too many people still think that Facebook photo albums are a solo affair. But they’re so easy to share! Just head to the album you’d like to share and click on “Edit”. There’s an easy-to-spot section for you to add contributors to the album.
Use this for sharing family albums, party albums or group holidays. Note that the privacy settings of the album can be set to either “Contributors” or “Friends of Contributors”. The latter may be a bit much for you if your friends have lots of friends.
Convert Your Profile Into a Page
If you started a Facebook profile for your business back in the day when you thought that was how Facebook worked, you’re actually under threat of having the account deleted. All Facebook profiles used for business purposes should be converted into pages. It’s not a difficult task, but a few things will change when you convert your Facebook profile to a page.
Migrate Followers to New Page
If you run a Facebook page and you’ve already changed the URL slug once, you might have realised you’re unable to change it again. However, if you’re in this position, you can use a simple trick to fix your problem. Start a new page, then merge the two pages and migrate your followers to the new one.
Get Rid of Invites
Most of the annoying Facebook invites come from the apps that your friends have installed. Go to your App Center via the link on the left on your Facebook home page, then click on Requests. From here, just click on the cross of every annoying app and it will give you the option to never receive an invite from that app again. You could also choose to block invites from people that invite you to every new app.
An extra thing to remember is you can do this as the notifications come in. When you see an invite in your notifications feed, just hover on it and click the cross for the option to turn off notifications for that app.
If this isn’t enough for you, see our complete guide to blocking facebook invites for a few more options.
Add Life Events to Your Timeline
Life event milestones on timelines have been around for ages, but very few people make good use of them. They can be a great way to show just a few highlights of your life publicly on your profile so that potential employers and the like can get an overview of who you are. These are easily set up by heading to your status bar and clicking on “Life Event”, but very few people even realise it’s there.
Subscribe to Notifications for Posts
You’ve seen those people who leave comments like “following” on almost every post, right? These are the people who haven’t worked out that you can turn notifications on for a post.
If you want to see comments on a particular post without making one yourself, just click in the top right and choose “Turn on notifications for this post”. It is actually this easy.
Unfollow, Don’t Unfriend
Unfollowing is the other great tip for clearing up your news feed. You unfollow someone when you want to stay friends with them for some reason, yet you don’t want to see their updates in your timeline ever. You might do this for old work acquaintences or school friends who you never expect to see again, yet don’t want to unfriend as such.
Some people go so far as to play games of Unfriend, Unfollow, Unlike in order to clear up their timelines. It would certainly work, but it’s not nearly as effective as only ever viewing a custom friends list — plus, custom friends lists can be used for other purposes, like choosing who can see you in chat.
Call Your Friends For Free
Get your smartphone out and open up Facebook Messenger. Find a contact you’d like to chat to and hit “Call”. It’ll use Facebook’s voice chat and your Wi-Fi or data plan instead of your mobile call plan. The only limit is that your friends need to be using Facebook Messenger on their phone too.
Use Facebook Graph Search Effectively
Facebook’s graph search can be a lot of fun and incredibly useful if you know how it works. Start with something simple like “My posts about…”, and you’ll see some options. Use it to take a trip down memory lane and search for anything in your timeline.
Try a few other cool Facebook graph searches like “Places in Paris, France my friends have been to” or “TV shows liked by people who work at MakeUseOf”. You’ll get the hang of what Facebook graph search can do in no time.
Save Links and Videos
When you’re browsing Facebook on your phone late at night and don’t want to wake anyone up, you’re rarely going to want to press play on an interesting-looking video. Instead, just click on the right-hand-side drop-down menu and choose “Save Video”.
You can also do this with links if you don’t have time to read something immediately. Later, you can find your saved links and videos by navigating through your timeline activity.
Sadly, you can’t save a status update to look at properly or comment on later, but you could always turn on notifications and hope someone else comments in the meantime, or just like it and find it in your activity later.
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