Facebook has a lot of incredible features for its users but most are often buried under the amount of things you can do on Facebook. One particular feature that is becoming more useful is the ability to organize and create friend lists. There are several benefits to using this feature and here is how you do it.
Creating And Filling Up A Friend List
Making lists on Facebook is nothing really new. In fact, you may have already seen what lists look like without creating one. These are called smart lists, lists that are automatically generated and filled based on the information you place on your profile and what the friends you have on Facebook have in common. Examples of these smart lists are things like work, family, city, and school.
But you can create your own with little to no worry. Here is how you do it:
- From the News Feed, click on Explore on the left hand side and find Friend Lists. If it’s not there, you may need to click on See More… and scroll to find it.
- Find Create List and click it.
- You’ll be given a pop up to give the list a name and also to include friends that you want to add to the list.
- Click Create once you’re done.
Also important to note is that you can create several lists. There isn’t a limit to how many you can make so if you’d like, you can be more specific to certain lists. What is also important to note is that you can freely add or remove individuals from those lists at any point in time.
Why Bother With This?
As the steps would suggest, there’s not really a quick way to add specific people. Furthermore if you’re looking to make a pretty large list, you’re going to have to spell out a lot of names. The task can be so arduous that many will ask what’s the point in all of this. What sort of benefits do you get from spending this much time making a handful of lists?
Well the biggest perk to this is deeper privacy. As I mentioned in a previous post regarding Facebook privacy tips, friend lists can help in permitting only specific individuals to seeing your posts. Maybe you have posts that you want only your friends and family to see. Making a friend list for that instance can help.
What’s also neat about this setup is that this also applies to your Stories. If you want Stories to be viewed by a specific group of people, then you can take advantage of this feature.
The only thing I’ll warn though is that it can get awkward if you use this feature regularly and decide to remove people from those lists. People will wonder why they can’t get access o your posts or stories and if it’s someone you know personally, they may bring that up.
Another distinct benefit is this can help in organizing your business. While having a Facebook page helps in personal branding, there are people who want to use their own profile to brand themselves. Being able to place their friends in specific lists can ensure that their friends don’t have their news feed filled with sales pitches or promotions all the time.
Friend Lists Help In Organizing Everything
Friend lists ultimately help in making your Facebook experience organized and safer. You can create a number of lists ensuring that people you don’t want to see specific posts get access to those particular posts.
It’s a rather long process to be building those lists, but they are worth it if you really value your privacy on the platform.