Facebook For Dummies
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The center portion of Facebook’s Messenger Inbox is dedicated to whichever conversation you have selected to look at. The most important thing to notice is that all the content here is the same content you would see in a chat window. Facebook doesn’t care where you wrote a message from, all of it goes into your message history. The most recent message is on the bottom of the page. Scroll up to see older messages. This should look like the same conversation in a chat window, just a bit bigger.

At the bottom of your conversation, below the most recent message, is the message composer. The message composer is similar to the one you use in the chat window. Simply type your response and press Enter to send. You can click the icons for sending photos, stickers, gifs, emojis, money, photos from your webcam, or likes.

One additional option you have from the composer is a microphone icon for recording voice messages to send to friends. Click the microphone icon then click the big red Record button to start recording your message. Click it again when you’re done to send it. You won’t have a chance to review your recording before it gets sent.

To the right of your conversation is info about the person (or people) you are talking to, as well as options related to that conversation. There is also a space where photos you have shared recently in the conversation are displayed. Some of the options, like Edit Nicknames and Change Color are the same as the options available to you when you’re using a chat window while browsing Facebook. The new options are:

  • Search in Conversation: Because Facebook messages aren’t broken into discreet emails with unique subjects, trying to scroll through a long message thread to find information like where you guys were supposed to meet or the name of so-and-so’s new boyfriend can be challenging. You can use search to try and find this type of information.

    Clicking Search in Conversation opens a search box at the top of the message thread. Simply type in the term you are searching for and press Enter. Facebook displays any results highlighted with the messages that were sent immediately before and after that term was used. Use the arrows next to the search box to flip to the next occurrence of that term. When you’re done using Search, click the Done button to the right of the search box to return to the entire conversation.

  • Change Emoji: Use this to choose an emoji to be the default emoji in the bottom right of the chat window. It will replace the Like emoji that is currently there. Everyone in the conversation will see that you’ve chosen a new emoji and be able to send it with just one click whenever they want.
  • Notifications: You can choose whether you receive notifications when you get a new message within a given conversation. You can also choose whether you get notifications when someone reacts (that is, likes or clicks another reaction icon) to something you said.

About This Article

This article is from the book:

About the book authors:

Carolyn Abram was a Facebook employee when the site was young. Her work explaining how to use Facebook began then and has continued ever since. She is also a fiction writer.

Amy Karasavas is a former Facebook employee who helped launch app directories, developers’ resources, and user testing tools. She currently works as a sommelier.

Carolyn Abram was a Facebook employee when the site was young. Her work explaining how to use Facebook began then and has continued ever since. She is also a fiction writer.

Amy Karasavas is a former Facebook employee who helped launch app directories, developers’ resources, and user testing tools. She currently works as a sommelier.

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