Facebook has put me into a conundrum. Recently I’ve made the observation that I get less interaction on my personal facebook profile each post than I did a year or so and 450+ friends ago. I believe the reason is, as my list has grown I’ve begun interacting with other people in my various “niches” (i.e. marketing), but because many of these people I’m interacting with have a unusually large friends list themselves, often on a post-by-post basis I get less reciprocity from them. But, never the less, my interacting with them has caused facebook to show these big-lists proportionately more than other people that may have in reality reciprocated more.
The good part of this whole situation is I have found the cure to my problem: the answer to this problem is lists. Lists allow you to sort your stream based on your list. Using this I can make categories or groups of people centered around topics of interest. So, instead of only paying attention to my default stream, I can use the lists to sort my stream based on what group I feel like needs to be interacted with at that moment.
But this left me with an important question… Now that I have nearly 1,000 friends (as of this posting) how do I go about categorizing the niches of interest that they are in? Thankfully, facebook recently changed *all* interests/activities into fan pages of their own. While at first I was very averse to this… I now see the light. You can visit virtually any “interest” or fan page and IMMEDIATELY identify who among my friends has “liked” that topic/brand/fanpage.
So, let’s say for example I want to build a “social media” list… What’s the next step? I’ll visit the Mashable fan page, open up a new window to my lists page in a new browser which I’ll sidle up next to my browser with the mashable fan page open, which… conveniently… lists all of my friends that have already liked that page! Since Mashable is a “social media” hot spot this makes it very easy to rapidly identify just who belongs to that “social media” list I’m creating.
Now go forth, blog, and engage that niche of your personal network that actually cares about the topic you’re writing about.
Tags: facebook, facebook lists, Mashable, seo, social media
Thanks for the tip. I definitely need to start utilizing the List feature on FB!
I’ve been using lists since they became available, actually. I wasn’t too big on the pages idea since it started linking to wrong stuff in my profile… but it’s starting to grow on me.