How to use Facebook? With over 2.5 billion monthly active users, it is the most famous social network in the world. Thanks to its ease of use and versatility, it is used in many occasions: to socialize, get informed about specific topics, find work, promote activities and sell products/services.
Initially created to share photos among groups of friends, today the platform of Mark Zuckerberg presents a large number of features that, in addition to expanding its possibilities of use, have made it an important business tool, useful for corporate communication and advertising.
In this article, I will explain how to use Facebook intelligently, both for personal and professional purposes. Specifically, I will tell you how to:
- sign up for the social network;
- find Friends;
- create messages and chat.
Furthermore, I will talk about the main functions of the platform, which you may not know yet, and how to use them for work. If you want to learn how to use Facebook and other social channels to promote your business or work in a corporate context, I recommend you to attend the Social Media Specialist Course. Through targeted theoretical-practical training, you can become an expert in online communication channels and strategies, building or improving your visibility or that of your company, online.
How to use Facebook and what you can do
How do you use Facebook? There are many people in the world who still don’t use Facebook (FB) or use it incorrectly because they don’t fully know its features. If you are one of these people but are considering activating your account or enhancing its use, know that using the main sections of the social network is really very simple. The steps to take, in fact, are few and intuitive.
Also, what I’m about to tell you is also valid if you want to learn how to use Facebook on your mobile phone, as the basic functions are exactly the same as those you can find in the desktop version. If you want to use Facebook on your smartphone, just know that you need to download the appropriate application, which is different depending on the operating system of your mobile phone (Android or iOS).
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Are you ready? Then keep reading; I’ll explain to you how to use Facebook step by step.
Registration and account creation
The first thing to do to start using Facebook is to access the platform, from a PC or a mobile device, and create an account. Then fill in the fields with the following information:
- name and surname,
- cell phone number or email address,
- date of birth (the platform asks for your date of birth because the user who wants to register must be over 13 years old),
- gender (you must indicate whether you are male or female),
- password.
Once you have entered all the data, click on “Sign Up”. From this moment on, your Facebook account is ready, and you can use it both to chat with acquaintances and to find new friends.
Find Friends and Create Groups
How to use Facebook to find Friends? Once you log in to your account, you can check if any of your acquaintances or friends have a profile on the social network. The easiest way to do this is to type the person’s name in the search bar at the top right, next to a magnifying glass icon, and press “Enter”. In a moment, if the person is registered on the social network, you will see their profile and you can send them a friend request. Alternatively, you can click on “Friends” and then “Find Friends” in the screen that appears. To speed up your search for contacts, you can also use the suggestions in the “People You May Know” section.
You can search for new Friends or accept requests from acquaintances or people interested in connecting with you. They can send you a friend request, which you can see in the “Notifications” section and accept or reject. Once you connect with someone, you can see each other’s posts and stories. If you want to remove a Friend, you can do so by clicking on the “Remove” button.
Groups are used to bring together people interested in the same topic or brand. When created by businesses, they are particularly useful for creating communities to interact with and provide interesting content to. How to use Facebook Groups? To create a Group, simply go to “Groups” and click the blue “Create New Group” button. Follow the guided instructions displayed on the screen to enter the group name, rules, and cover image.
Create Posts and Stories
Facebook is mainly used to share posts and chat with friends. To write a post, simply go to the Home page (also known as the News Feed or Profile) and click on the section “What’s on your mind [username]”. Clicking on it with your mouse (or with your finger, if you are using a mobile phone) will open a window where you can compose your post. You can write a thought, talk about an event or your daily life, raise awareness among your Friends on a certain topic, or explain your work. You can enrich the message with emojis, photos or videos, set a mood, indicate your location, and set a background. You can also insert GIFs, tag people, and even do a live video.
Before publishing your post, if you want, you can also select the type of audience with whom to share your message by choosing between: “Everyone” (set by default), “Friends”, “Friends except…”, “Specific friends”, “Only me”, “Custom”, “Close friends”, “Colleagues and clients” and “Acquaintances”. When the post is ready, click on the blue bar at the bottom with the word “Publish” and you’re done.
The social network also gives you the opportunity to create stories. How to use Facebook Stories? The Story is a short-lived content, viewable for a maximum of 24 hours only by those who follow you or by everyone, indiscriminately, if you have made its visibility public. The audience can interact with it by inserting comments or reactions.
Now I’ll explain how to create a story on Facebook. The easiest thing is to create it via smartphone, although it is also possible to do it from a PC, using photos or videos saved in memory. The fundamental steps to take are:
- Open the official Facebook app and position yourself on the Feed. At the top, where you also see the stories published by your friends, click on the image of your profile.
- Choose the type of Story to create, among the various possibilities: Text, Green Screen, Boomerang, and Selfie.
- After choosing the type of content, choose the photo or video to associate, or make them on the spot.
- Add stickers, text, music, freehand drawings, or special effects to the image.
- Click on the “Share in Story” button. At this point, the Story is visible at the top, next to the Stories published by other friends.
- If you want to save the story, you can do so by clicking on “Save Story” at the bottom left next to the “Share in Story” button.
If you have saved the story without publishing it, before doing so, you can further modify it by inserting other effects. One last thing: on this social channel, you can also publish Instagram Stories, thanks to cross-posting.
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What else can you do on Facebook? You can comment on posts as you scroll through your News Feed. Commenting on other published posts is very simple. At the bottom of each published post, you will see three options for interaction:
- “Like”: this is the classic reaction you give after seeing a published post, with the possibility of choosing a reaction based on your mood, which corresponds to an emoticon. What are they, and how many are there? There are seven types of reactions: “Like”, “Love”, “Hug”, “Haha” (laughter), “Wow” (amazement), “Sad” (sadness), and finally “Angry” (anger).
- “Comment”: it gives you the possibility to write a comment. Once published, the comment will be displayed in order of publication.
- “Share”: it gives you the possibility to share the post you are viewing directly in your Feed or on your page. You can also share it as a Story. Additionally, you have the option to add text to invite, for example, your friends to share it as well.
Another thing you can do on Facebook is to chat directly with a person. To do this, just click on the symbol at the bottom right “New message”, search for the friend you want to write to and compose the message. You can customize the message with emojis, photos, videos, stickers, GIFs, files, and audio clips.
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Additional Features of Facebook
To complete this small guide on how to use Facebook, we cannot miss an overview of the recent functionalities of the social network, which have made it much more versatile and interesting. Let’s see them together:
- Facebook Live: allows you to do live streams, both on mobile and on PC. It can be accessed through the “Live” button located below the box to create a post.
- Marketplace: is the sales platform of the social channel where you can sell everything from small objects to cars, both new and used.
- Facebook Dating: is a dating space that allows you to meet new people who are also registered on the platform.
- Facebook Rooms: are virtual rooms, which are used to do live streams exclusively with people invited through the function itself.
- Messenger: is the messaging platform used to send private messages. It can only be used through a personal account.
- Watch: is the function where videos published by other users are collected.
How to use Facebook for your business
After explaining how to use Facebook and its main features, I imagine you are curious to know how to use it to promote your business. Whether you are a freelancer or the head of a company, with Facebook you can:
- do brand awareness, which is essential especially at the beginning. To make yourself known to the potential audience, you can use both organic and sponsored content;
- loyalize customers: it’s not enough to have an audience, but you need to retain it by involving them and providing interesting and valuable content;
- promote your products and services: directly on FB (for example on Marketplace) or through videos and posts that invite the user to delve deeper into the company website;
- recruit personnel (social recruiting).
To use Facebook as a Business tool, you must have a public page. A page offers many more advantages than a personal profile:
- it can exceed the 5000 friends imposed for the private profile,
- it allows a high level of customization,
- it provides useful statistical information to better understand the characteristics and behavior of followers (Facebook Insights),
- it allows you to do advertising campaigns,
- it can be managed by multiple people, with different roles.
Thanks to the company page, you can make yourself visible by publishing posts, videos, Stories, creating live streams and events. You can also take advantage of the automatic response platform (chatbot) to provide useful information to your customers or potential ones right away. Furthermore, to increase visibility, customers, and sales, you can use two important Facebook marketing tools: Facebook Business Manager and Facebook Ads. The first is a free platform that allows you to manage all digital marketing activity on the social network, while the second is a paid service for creating ads, campaigns, and sponsored posts.
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Using Facebook Safely: Helpful Tips
How to use Facebook to make it more secure? There are some best practices that can help you keep your personal account or page safe. The main ones are:
- Set your privacy settings to “Friends” only; this way only the friends you have accepted can interact with you, not strangers.
- Untag yourself from photos that you don’t approve of or don’t want to share.
- Do not share photos that could compromise your image on the web.
- If you use Facebook for work, limit yourself to including only contacts that are useful for professional purposes (phone number, business address, and email).
- Use a two-step password: it’s used to verify that the person is actually authorized to manage the Facebook page, the Facebook Business Manager, or the Ads platform.
- Change your password frequently. Do not use passwords that could be guessed, such as your birthdate.
- Make friends on Facebook, but be careful. Don’t accept friend requests from people you don’t actually know. Before accepting a friend request, it’s advisable to visit their profile to see if you really know them, especially through their photos.
DEEPENING
To understand how to use Facebook to strengthen your personal branding and how important it is for your business, I’ll report the interview with Veronica Gentili, an expert in Web and Social Media Marketing.
How to use Facebook for personal branding?
First of all, Facebook is currently the most inhabited social network, both worldwide with its 890 million active monthly users, and in Italy (26 million registered users). If we ask ourselves how to use Facebook and why to use it for personal branding, these figures are enough to understand how interesting it is.
Even from a qualitative point of view, it is a very important resource, with a very high average time spent on the social network (about 8 hours per month) concentrated mainly on the news feed, which is the continuous flow of news from users and pages that you follow. In addition, it provides a great opportunity for expression, through the sharing of multimedia content, the ability to write notes, very long posts, and to use many other types of content. It therefore guarantees, for those who know and know how to use Facebook various modes of self-telling.
Among the things that I recommend doing to strengthen your personal branding, there is certainly the choice of the type of tool to use: profile, page or both. Obviously, using both requires a very important effort in terms of time.
If you decide to use your personal profile, I recommend making good use of lists; a very common mistake, in fact, that people who do not know how to use Facebook for their personal branding make is to confuse and overlap the personal level with the professional one. Using lists to filter content sharing solves this problem.
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How to use Facebook for your business?
To optimize your company page, you must first be very careful, during the creation phase, about the category of your business. It is in fact the category that allows us to be immediately recognized and categorized. Especially for what concerns the search for users and places.
Another factor to which to pay close attention is the name: users often search for pages that interest them. For this reason, if our name is not consistent with what we use most often or is not recognizable, we risk losing many customers who are looking for us only because we have not understood how to use Facebook correctly.
Very important is also the description and address of the company, which not only allows us to be recognized immediately and to understand what we offer, but also serves in terms of positioning. All the content within FB is indexed by search engines. Other very important elements are reviews, which allow us to understand how much we are appreciated by people and at the same time to evaluate the feedback from our customers.
Last but not least, the Call To Action, which allows people visiting the page to immediately take the action that is important to us, such as subscribing, downloading, or purchasing.
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Why should a company choose Facebook over other social networks?
Before making a decision, every company should analyze where their target audience is present. It must be a strategic choice, not a choice dictated by personal impressions or opinions. That being said, as we mentioned before, Facebook is the most populated social network and has the most complete advertising platform.
The possibilities offered by Facebook Ads to reach people are truly many, both from a creative and methodological point of view. Facebook also allows for high interaction with the public: the possibility of creating events, offers, and posts makes Facebook probably the most complete social network for any business that wants to promote itself, provided that it understands how to use Facebook and all its tools.
Conclusions and strategic advice on Facebook
In this article, I have tried to explain how to use Facebook, covering the most important and useful aspects for using it effectively, especially for professional purposes. Specifically, I have talked about:
- how to activate a personal profile or a page on Facebook,
- what you can do on the social network, both on the private and business sides,
- how to use it to promote your business,
- what precautions to take to use Facebook safely.
Finally, I have reported an example of using the social network thanks to the contribution of Veronica Gentili.
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