How to Update Your Facebook Status

By Carolyn Abram from Facebook For Dummies, 4th Edition

The most common type of post that you see people make on Facebook is a status update that answers the question, “What’s on your mind?” On Facebook, people refer to this type of post as a status update or just as their status. Status updates are quick, short, and completely open to interpretation. People may update them with what they may be doing at that moment (“Eating a snack”), offer a random observation (“A cat in my backyard just caught a snake!”), or request info (“Planning a trip to India this summer. Anyone know where I should stay?”) It’s very easy for friends to comment on statuses, so a provocative update can really get the conversation going.

Status updates sound small and inconsequential, but when they are added together, they can tell a really big story for one person or for many people. For close friends, they let you keep up-to-date on their daily lives and share a casual laugh over something that you might never hear about otherwise. As a collective, statuses are how news spreads quickly through Facebook. Because your posts go into your friends’ News Feeds, a single update can have a big impact and is somewhat likely to be repeated in some way or another. For example, news of a minor earthquake in my area of California spread faster on Facebook than it did on news sites.

To update your status, follow these steps:

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Click in the What’s on Your Mind? field of the Share menu.

This expands the Share menu.

Type your comment/thought/status.

Frequently, people use their status updates to bring attention to something else on the Internet. It may be an article they found interesting, or an Event, a photo album, or anything else they want to publicize. Usually, people add a comment to explain the link; other times, they use the link itself as their status, almost as though they’re saying, “What I’m thinking about right now is this link.”

(Optional) Click the person icon in the bottom gray bar of the Publisher to add tags to your post.

Tags are ways of marking people you are with when you’re writing a status update in a way that links back to their timeline and notifies them of your update. When you tag someone, an additional bit of text is added to the status, so it looks like this: “Off to play board games with .” Eric then receives a notification that you tagged him.

(Optional) Click the location pin icon to add a location.

You can click this pin and begin typing a city or place name, and Facebook tries to auto-complete the place where you are. Letting friends know where you are (also called checking in) is a great way to increase the chances of serendipitous encounters.

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(Optional) Click the Friends menu in the bottom-right corner.

This allows you to control who can see this particular post.

Click Post.

Posts with links mean you can share something you like with a lot of friends without having to create an e-mail list, call up someone to talk about it, or stand behind someone and say, “Read this.” At the same time, you’re almost more likely to get someone to strike up a conversation about your content because it’s going out to more people, and you're reaching a greater number of people who may be interested in it.

To post a link, simply follow the instructions for updating a status and copy and paste the link you want into the field where you normally type a status. This automatically expands a preview of what your post will look like, including a preview of the content. You can then choose a thumbnail to accompany the preview or edit the content of the preview by hovering over the thing you want to change and clicking it when it turns yellow. Add your own comment or explanation in the space where you’d enter a status.