Facebook 101 Tutorial for Beginners

Welcome to the Basic Facebook Tutorial.

This short lesson is intended for users who are new to facebook and want to get up and running quickly in this extremely popular Online Social Network. We will cover simple tasks such as participating in friend’s conversations, editing a profile and fan page and posting content to a specific wall.

Facebook started off in 2004 as a way for Harvard students (only) to communicate with each other in a more effective way than email would allow. Today, it the semi-public forum of millions of people all over the world.

For many, facebook is a place to share photos and thoughts with their friends and family, but for a growing number it is a perfect place to debate, discuss and research specific matters of interest.

To begin, go to www.facebook.com and create an account or log in to an existing one. To continue this slide-show tutorial, click the right arrow button.
If you are relatively new to facebook, this is what you will see.
User with many friends would be directly sent to the ‘News Feed’, but when you start facebook encourages you to find and add people to your friends list. Nevertheless, the links to various facebook functionalities remain the same, so we will cover them now:
1- The facebook logo at the top left links to the recently implemented ‘News Feed’ where you can see a customizable display of your friends’ activities.
2- This button is used to view and accept friend requests.
3- This button will show you messages that were sent to you privately… it is your facebook email inbox in a way.
4- The world logo button will make available all notifications about friends’ activities that concern you (someone commented on your status, photo, etc…)
5- The ‘Profile’ button will bring you to your personal profile. Here you will see your wall activity and information. It is somewhat similar to a myspace wall. It’s yours.
6- The ‘Account’ is extremely important. Clicking it will open a drop down list of options relative to your account. Come here to log off, manage your privacy settings, etc…
7- Fan page owners will have this link allowing them to manage their fan pages and ads.
If you have friends already, upon log-in you will see the ‘News Feed’.
This page is made to maximize your access to your friends. On the left hand side you will see who is online and available for instant chat. On the right you will see what events you might want to attend. Our main focus is in the middle, where you can see the raw “stream of consciousness” of all your friends.
1- Notice that the buttons at the top left discussed previously will display a red number tag when facebook has something to share with you. -2- Directly here in the News Feed you can post a status comment. Anything you enter here will appear in your friends’ view of the News Feed.
Let’s look more closely at a friend’s comment.-3- Next to his thumbnail photo and name, you can see the initial comment that started a conversation. -4- Just below it facebook gives you loads of options and useful information. You see how long ago the initial comment was posted. You are given the options to ‘Comment’ or simply ‘Like’, both of which will re-post this conversation into your own stream, making it visible to friends you don’t necessarily share with the initial author of the comment. You can also view the entire conversation by clicking on the appropriate link.
-5- Even without clicking on ‘View all n comments’, facebook shows you the last two responses to the initial comment. People can keep participating in this conversation as many times as they want, and if you are part of it, facebook will let you know it is still alive. Eventually though, it WILL get dropped and disappear into the ocean of facebook information.

-6- To encourage users to participate, facebook appends an input field at the bottom of the comment so that you may write into it.
This is what a profile page looks like. You get here by clicking the ‘Profile’ button…
1- Your profile picture will appear just about everywhere. You can easily change it by hovering over it with the mouse and clicking the link that appears. -2- Underneath your picture are many links to view and edit information about yourself. -3- This text box can be changed anytime but remains the way you leave it. Just like almost everything else you do on facebook, when you change this, facebook will notify your friends. -4- This input field is the same as the one on the ‘News Feed’ page. Whatever you post here will appear on your wall and in the News Feed of your friends. -5- Below is your wall. It display most of your activities, and your friends can also post to it. -6- On the right hand side of the page, facebook ads appear… in case you were wondering about making one of your own…
The facebook search box is an extremely useful feature. You can type literally anything into it as it is the single go-to place to find friends, pages, or even conversation subjects.As you can see here, facebook (like the new google interface) will start showing you results as you type even BEFORE you hit enter.IF YOU HIT ENTER it will send you not to a results page, but directly to the first results in the list.To do a more calm, extensive research: click on the on the “See More Results” button at the very bottom of the list…
As stated earlier, facebook will return results that correspond to:- Friends names (in this case I have no friends with New Orleans in their name)- Page names (1)
- Posts and conversations of friends (2).

This is very useful to search all conversations you have access to by subject, if you plan on talking only about that subject and to people who are ALREADY concerned with that theme.

Not visible in the current image, there are links that allow to view all results corresponding to the terms you searched for and in the content your are interested in (friends, pages or posts).
Now let’s look at managing a fan page. To access your fan page, you can either search for it in the search box (it should appear as one of the first results), or click on the ‘Ads and Pages’ link that we covered on slide 2. If you access it through the second method, you will see a set of options available to manage the details of the page.In this simple tutorial we will not cover each of those options, but they are quite self-explanatory and you know where to find them.
Moving on…
A Page’s wall is almost identical to a Profile’s wall.Apart from some extra information boxes on the left hand side, everything is handled the same way as explained earlier. Notice below the Page’s main image the links:- ‘Edit Page’ will take you to the options we saw in the previous slide-show.
- ‘Promote with an Ad’ allows you to create and manage an Ad campaign.

- ‘Suggest to Friends’ allows you to invite your friends to “like” the page. This is useful if you already have a network of friends to leverage.
Let’s look at adding your page fans to your friends list. The reason being that facebook only displays the conversations of your FRIENDS on the News Feed page. So if you want to search and participate in the conversations of people who liked you Fan Page, you first have to successfully add them as friends. To do so, click the ‘See All’ link in the upper right corner of the ‘X People Like This’ box. A pop-up will appear in the middle of the screen. Simply click the name of the person you wish to add…
You won’t see much on the profile page of a non-friend, because most people choose to display near to nothing on their public profile.
The good news is that a giant button will appear in the middle at the top of the page that says ‘+1 Add as Friend’. This is how you can invite someone to be your friend. This will open a pop-up where you can confirm your desire to befriend the person, as well as add a personal message to convince them to accept. Before the link is created, they must accept your friendship.
That concludes the cycle of facebook: make a profile, make friends, participate in conversations, speak your mind, listen to others… and add more friends!
This also concludes our short Facebook 101 lesson, provided by Adal Design: small business consultant.

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