Facebook has been a life-changing application for me. Of course I love to get updates from friends and family about their lives, but one of the biggest things is that I can follow pages of interest as a professional speech path. Here are five things that have really helped me get the most out of my Facebook experience:
- Save later. Over my lunch I will spy something on my news feed that looks really interesting, but I don’t have time to check it out. If you press the drop down arrow on the upper right-hand side, you can save that video or that link for later. It will be saved in a list called Saved, which appears on the side to the left. When you go back to your homepage, it’s there for you to read. In the above example, you can see I saved an interesting article about stuttering that I waited to check out when I had more time.
- “See first” function. This function is perfect when you have a Facebook page you enjoy and you don’t want to miss a single post. For example, Project Happiness is a uplifting Facebook quote page. Instead of missing them on days that I don’t check Facebook until the end of the day, Facebook will show those posts first in my feed. Just a note: it doesn’t always show them immediately, but after a few hours I will see a grouping of their posts. I definitely recommend this feature for Facebook pages that you’re interested in not losing track of.
- Turn on/off notifications. If there’s a comment thread that’s really interesting to you, you can use this feature to see all the comments left under the photo or status. I’ve noticed that people will put like an asterisk, “F”, or “following” because they want to get all of the updates on that thread. However, when you do that, you show the world that you’re interested in this cause — and maybe you would rather do that incognito. Click on the down arrow in the upper right-hand corner and check “Turn on notifications” so then you will also receive notifications of that post. On the flip side, sometimes after you comment on something, you get a million notifications of other people after you commenting. For example, somebody had a baby and you typed in “congratulations,” but after that you get notifications from every single person after you. This can be disruptive and annoying. Again, you can go to the drop down arrow on the upper hand right hand side and click “turn off notifications.” You will no longer receive notifications from that post.
- Facebook groups by common interests. I’ve joined several different groups that relate to my interests. For example, the school-based speech pathology group is a group I’m a member of and I get a lot out of the information shared by members. It is a closed group which means that only the people in that group can see what people post. I wouldn’t post clinical questions unless they were completely anonymous because of HIPPA and other privacy rules but it is interesting to see what other professionals are talking about and dealing with professionally at the moment. There are a multitude of speech therapy focused groups (search under “Groups” on the lefthand side of your Facebook homepage). Also I do subscribe to a gluten-free group because I’m gluten free where I get information about gluten-free products and trends. There are groups for every interest — I’ve probably joined 35 different groups! I know it seems like a lot but it certainly is interesting for me to keep up with everything that people are talking about.
However, I would say that keep in mind that some of these groups are public so if you see that little world (see above photo for an example of the little world icon). What that means is that everything that you post there is public information. You want to be careful in case you are posting sensitive information about yourself or your family members. I would also add that the group notifications will appear in your feed as if they are status updates from friends so you will see more of your groups input then you may want. - Organizations’ Facebook pages. So many different pages exist made by organizations that you enjoy or centered around topics that also are interesting. I recommend browsing different pages and liking them because you can get valuable information from deals or offers, to articles and meaningful content. It’s great! I can’t count how often I’ve found things I really needed to know about!
I hope these tips help you figure out how to make Facebook more efficient and relevant to your life. Do you have any other tips for me? Please share them below.
Have a great week (online and off!) ~Sarah