getting started with facebook for journalists

Adding friends on Facebook is easy. Just find people and send a request. You can also upload a contact file so you can invite friends "in bulk." Facebook will also—with your permission and your email password—search your email account to see who you email and enable you to invite the people you email to become your Facebook friend. You can also send an email to friends who are not on Facebook inviting them to join Facebook so that they can be your Facebook friend. And just as it's easy for you to invite people, people will start to invite you.

However, you're not sure you want to share the same information about yourself with your co-workers as you do with your family members. And your co-workers probably aren't as interested in the personal parts of your life as your family members. Casual acquaintances could be Facebook friends but you don't want to share much with them…but you still want to keep tabs on them. And your readers will find you and invite you to be their Facebook friends. Chances are you don't want them to have your home address.

Facebook Friend Lists are a way for you to control what information you share with custom lists of friends. You can create as many Facebook Friends Lists as you like. Friends can be on multiple lists. Each Facebook Friends lists can have custom privacy settings. This section shows how to create Facebook Friends Lists.

From your personal Facebook homepage click Friends in the blue menu bar at the top of the screen.

Here's the Facebook Friends page.  To create a custom list of your friends with custom privacy settings for each list, start by clicking + Create [under Lists in the left column].

Name the list and select the friends that will be in the list. Note that you need to click the picture or name to make a selection.

You can also create Friends list with no one on the list. Use this to prepare for a category of friends that you haven't yet started to gather…like Readers or Family.

This image shows multiple lists. The next section will show how to use these lists to set custom privacy and information access settings.