What You Can Do on Facebook

By Carolyn Abram from Facebook For Dummies, 4th Edition

Facebook lets you connect with people who matter to you. When you sign up for Facebook, one of the first things you do is establish your Profile. A Profile on Facebook is a social résumé — a page about you that you keep up-to-date with all the information you want people to know.

The motivations for establishing a Profile on Facebook are twofold. First, a Profile helps the people who know you in real life find and connect with you on Facebook. The second (and way cooler) reason to establish an accurate Profile is the work it saves you. Keeping your Profile detailed and relevant means that your friends and family can always get the latest information about where you live, who you know, and what you’re up to.

Here are some other fun things to do on Facebook

Connect with friends: On Facebook, it’s pretty common to refer to friending people you know. This just means establishing the virtual connection. Friending people allows you to communicate and share with them more easily. Friends are basically the reason Facebook can be so powerful and useful to people. After all, you can only sit and stare at your own Profile for so long.
Communicate with Facebook friends: Facebook streamlines finding and contacting people in a reliable forum. If the friend you’re reaching out to is active on Facebook, no matter where she lives or how many times she’s changed her e-mail address, you can reach one another.
Share your thoughts: Maybe you’re proud of the home team, maybe you’re excited for Friday, or maybe you can’t believe what you saw on the way to work this morning. All day long, things are happening to all of us that make us just want to turn to our friends and say, “You know what? . . . That’s what.” Facebook gives you the stage and an eager audience.
Share your pictures: Since the invention of the modern-day camera, people have been all too eager to yell, “Cheese!” Photographs can make great tour guides on trips down memory lane, but only if we actually remember to develop, upload, or scrapbook them. Many memories fade away when the smiling faces are stuffed into an old shoe box, remain on undeveloped rolls of film, or are forgotten in some folder on a hard drive.
Plan Events, join groups: Just about anything you do with other people is easier on Facebook . . . except cuddling. Facebook isn’t meant to be a replacement for face-to-face interaction; it’s meant to facilitate interactions when face time isn’t possible or to facilitate the planning of face time. Two of the greatest tools for this are Facebook Events and Facebook Groups.
Promote a cause or business: In addition to your friends and family, you interact with tons of other things or entities every day. These may be a newspaper or magazine, a celebrity whose marriage travails you can’t help but be fascinated by, a television show that has you on the edge of your seat, or a cause that’s near and dear to your heart. All these entities can be represented on Facebook through Pages (with a capital P). These Pages look almost exactly like Profiles, just for the not-quite-people among us. Instead of becoming “Friends” with Pages, you can “Like” them. So when you Like a television show (say, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart), you’ll start to see updates from The Daily Show on your Home page. Liking Pages for businesses or causes helps you stay up-to-date with news from them.