Five Ways to Customize Your Facebook Browsing

Part of the Facebook All-in-One For Dummies Cheat Sheet

When you join Facebook, you can customize how you browse Facebook to help you keep your contacts, updates, and interactions organized. An efficient organization saves times by giving you more control of what you see and don’t see. Here are five ways you can customize Facebook browsing:

Use lists. Facebook enables you to group your connections based on criteria that you determine. You can create your own lists for local friends, blogging buddies, family, and so on. With lists, you can check out what everyone's doing without missing updates that may have slid by in your News Feed.
Use your navigation wisely. Your main Facebook page shows your navigation options in the left sidebar. You can move list and groups you visit most frequently to your Favorites at the top so you can easily access them.
Subscribe to Fan Page Timelines you like. Just about every website out there has a link to its Facebook Fan Page Timeline. The next time you visit your favorite website, check for a Facebook link. Clicking the Facebook link takes you to the Fan Page Timeline for that site, and from there, you can click the Like button to subscribe to the Fan Page. Many people use Facebook as a feed reader (a way to know when a website publishes new content). When you Like a Fan Page, any time it updates, you can see it in your News Feed (though you need to interact regularly with those posts to continue seeing them).
Subscribe to public figures you like. Public figures can be athletes, celebrities, or even social causes. A few public figures are Neil deGrasse Tyson (an astrophysicist who makes science accessible to lay people: https://www.facebook.com/neiltyson) and George Takei (the actor who played Sulu in the original Star Trek series: https://www.facebook.com/georgehtakei) — both of whom update their Facebook statuses regularly in interesting ways. As well, you can find just about any big-wig from any industry on Facebook.
Create a Group and invite people you like to interact with. You can make some incredible personal and professional connections with people because of Groups. Groups start out with a common thread. That thread may be that you know all these people, or it may be that you're all passionate about video games. You invite people, and those people suggest adding people they know. Before you know it, you're meeting new people who share your same interests.