Wednesday, March 24, 2010

How NOT to annoy your Facebook Friends!

So, here’s the deal: You want to play Farmville, or some other application, but your Facebook friends are tired of seeing all your game crap pop up in their newsfeeds, right? You might even actually LOSE friends on facebook because of all the annoying messages your applications put on your wall. So, this walk through tells you how to still share the info with your app-friends without annoying the rest of the world! (me included).

This walk through assumes you know at least how to make a friend list on Facebook and how to add people to that group. I’ve created a list of friends in my Facebook called Farmville just for this purpose. If you don’t know how to to that much, stop reading this because it’s not going to make sense to you….

Step 1: Publishing to your wall

So, you get that pop-up that says “Publish this story to your Facebook Wall and your friends’ home pages?” Before you hit the “publish” button and annoy the whole world, try this trick first.

farmville1

Steo 2: Customize who will see your post

Using your mouse, click that little Lock icon and choose “Custom    edit”

farmville2

Step 3: Changing the visibility

You will be prompted with this screen. If you press “only friends” which is the default, you’ll publish the post to EVERYONE on your list. We don’t want that so press the down arrow to narrow down who you want to see this.

farmville3

If you choose “Specific People” you will be given a choice of what friends or friends-lists you want to share this news with. Select this option to be given the choice to edit the list.

farmville4

Step 4: Entering the name of your friends list.

I titled my Farmville friends list “Farmville Friends” so I simply type F, a, r, m, v into the friends box and I see the friend list selection that I want to publish to. Select that list.

farmville5

The following image shows what it looks like after I selected the Farmville Friends. Press Save Setting to go back to the main screen.

farmville6

Step 5: Publish

Now you’re back at your main screen and you can press “Publish.” All the friends in your selected list will see the post, but your other non-app friends won’t be bothered.

farmville7

Yes, if you’re curious, this works for ANY application or group of friends. Here are a few other ways I use this to post to my wall in case you’re looking for other examples where this might be useful:

  • Post special announcements to my “Clients” list about work related deals that my friends won’t care about.
  • Post personal normal life stuff to my “friends” list but not my clients.. maybe I don’t want a client to see that I’m griping about them on Facebook? Know what I mean?
  • Post Family reunion information only to my Family so I don’t have to hear lots of comments from other people who might otherwise respond and clog up my email.

I hope you’ve found this post useful. If you want further clarification on anything, please leave a comment and I’ll respond. If you think this post is worth sharing, please feel free to share the URL with your friends. I could use the traffic to my site and I always enjoy new visitors.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Thanks for taking a moment to leave a comment! Please keep the language clean. (If you are considering spamming the blog, don't bother. It's going to be deleted anyway.)