How to use a List to tame the new Facebook. And hide those right-hand ads...

1. Create a List - I called mine "All".

2. Add the friends & pages you want to it - I added all mine. You need to go through the alphabet in search box to add pages.

3. Voila! Use the list instead of News Feed to see Facebook as you are used to.

4. Mark the List as a "Favorite" so it appears at top left under News Feed.

5. If you add new friends or like new pages you'll need to add these to your List. Maybe do this once a week so you don't forget.

6. Make sure to check in the Manage List drop-down & select all the "updates to show" that you want.

Erm, that's it, except when you use the List, as an added bonus, you won't see adverts on the right or the new activity stream :-)

There may be a few advanced issues with this, eg Page admins can't do this in page view. If you find any other issues or tricks do let me know...

PS I can use my new List on my Android FB app too, and it remembers it as the default view!

Campaign where your audience is & in Inverclyde that's Facebook (mostly).

Popular online campaigns in Inverclyde (and probably in most other areas in the UK) are predominantly centred around Facebook. There's some older Bebo & MySpace stuff too as well as a slowly increasing Twitter usage. But contrary to where some social media folk focus, Facebook is the place to be seen.

Facebook dominates so much that there's a wild mix of personal profiles used as pages, pages used as groups, groups used as pages & even personal profiles disguised as pages(!) If you compare the followers of Pages vs Twitter accounts it can be 10 to 1 in favour of Facebook.

There's good reason for this. Personal Facebook profiles are what the vast majority are used to dealing with & they are comfortable with that. Folks don't relate so well to the new groups, though that's improving. Pages are networking together better and mainstream users are getting more and more used to them. Still, if you want to make an impact quickly a new dedicated page, run like a profile, is the way to go. Many people find Twitter just too unintuitive to "get-it".

Add on some semi-automated Twitter and you can reach out to a wider bunch of earlier adopting types to pull them into to your core content, which while not fancy, is easily stored on Facebook as Notes. Personally I think it's best to add a blog to pull it all together as a central point, but the main traffic still comes in from Facebook. As always if there's no actual content, don't bother.

With new tools like ifttt it's possible to semi-automate content & messaging across many channels, tuning them as the newer channels evolve and the older ones display strong user patterns.

Towards a new #FollowFriday. Mentioning new followers avoid cliques & adds sparkle.

Sick of seeing the same people mentioned over & over in #FollowFriday messages on Twitter? I am. I also noticed a new trend of welcoming new followers rather than reinforcing existing cliques. It seems much more open, democratic & less celebrity obsessed, so I've been adopting the practice too.

What I do now is to follow everyone mentioned in a #FollowFriday that includes me, then after a week if I haven't grown tired of their tweets, will say hello as an alternative to the now out-dated #FF. I get about 10 or so new followers each week & say hi to them the next in only one or two tweets. If other folks upgrade to this approach they'll find their tired timelines have some new sparkle.

Of course I do reserve the right to give special mentions to pet projects, causes or extra special folks, but I think I'm now sharing more of the love with newer folks who deserve a break. What do you think?