With the advent of Facebook as a keeping-in-touch tool for (just about) everyone over the past year or two, I am often surprised by how much my friends and acquaintances remember about my status updates and my life in general. It often serves as a conversational shortcut, keeping me from the necessity of catching everyone up on what I’ve been doing, even when I haven’t seen them in months.
Conversely, I think some people expect me to pay attention to each of their updates. Herein lies the challenge. 🙂
“I don’t know if you saw it on Facebook or not, but we’re expecting another baby.”
“You probably already know this from Facebook, but I quit my job.”
And so on.
Well, frankly, I haven’t always done a terrific job of keeping up on news from my friends and family on Facebook in the past, but I found a way to change that, and I wanted to share it with you.
As with most things that are worth doing in the social media world, this is a little bit time-consuming to do on a regular basis, but I can assure you that it’s worth the time if you take a few minutes each day or even weekly to spend on this technique.
Before I give you this tip, I guess I should take a minute to explain that “EdgeRank” is the algorithm that Facebook uses to determine who shows up in your “News Feed”, which is the default page that you see when you first log in to the network. This is dependent on three distinct (and somewhat complex) factors; for a full explanation, you can see a terrific article on Techcrunch here.
So, how can you easily manage to interact with a large number of people while still paying attention to their updates (i.e. taking this out of Facebook’s hands and controlling it yourself)?
First, in the upper left hand corner of the page, click on “Friends”:
After that, click on “Status Updates”:
As you might well imagine, this page will display ALL status updates for ALL of your friends.
This is a great place to scan updates quickly to see what your friends are up to, and to interact with them.
My only caveat about doing rapid-fire responses on this page is to be prepared for the onslaught of replies. You might consider changing your Facebook settings so that you won’t have to deal with emails from that. Just a suggestion. 🙂
I hope this is helpful. I found that it expanded my Facebook horizons quite a bit, rather than depending on their news feed algorithm.
If you have any questions, let me know. Also, we provide coaching on this stuff and we can help you to develop a solid marketing strategy for your business.
Jason,
it always amazes me how much some people keep up with my life & career through Facebook. Oftentimes they remember things about me that I forgot myself!
Great tip…especially when you have a lot of friends. Will this work with your lists. I know that I categorize my friends in lists and the lists help me see exactly which friends/family members have updated their status in smaller groups.
Brian – I feel exactly the same way. People seem to really track (stalk?) me there sometimes. 🙂
Julia – Yes, this same technique will work with lists that you’ve created. Just click on Friends, then the name of the list, and you should see what they’ve been posting.