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Published:
May 4, 2021

Facebook For Dummies

Overview

Be a new face on Facebook!

If you're new to the Facebook user community, don't be shy: you're joining around 2.7 billion users (roughly two-and-a-half Chinas) worldwide, so you'll want to make sure you’re being as sociable as possible. And with more functionality and ways to say hello—like 3-D photos and Video Chat rooms—than ever before, Facebook For Dummies is the perfect, informative companion to get and new and inexperienced users acquainted with the main features of the platform and comfortable with sharing posts, pictures (or whatever else you find interesting) with friends, family, and the world beyond!

In a chatty, straightforward style, your friendly hosts, Carolyn Abram and Amy Karasavas—both former Facebook employees—help you get settled in with the basics, like setting up your profile and adding content, as well as protecting your privacy when you want to decide who can and can't see your posts. They then show you how to get involved as you add new friends, toggle your newsfeed, shape your timeline story, join groups, and more. They even let you in on ways to go pro and use Facebook for work, such as building a promo page and showing off your business to the world. Once you come out of your virtual shell, there'll be no stopping you!

  • Build your profile and start adding friends
  • Send private messages and instant notes
  • Share your memories
  • Tell stories about your day
  • Set your privacy and curate your news feed

Don't be a wallflower: with this book you have the ideal icebreaker to get the party started so you can join in with all the fun!

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About The Author

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.

Sample Chapters

facebook for dummies

CHEAT SHEET

Facebook is one of the dominant social networking sites in the world. Facebook lets you share photos, videos, links, status updates, and much more with your friends. As you discover how this social networking site works, use this handy reference to help you find people on Facebook, communicate with friends, and figure out what to do as soon as you log in.

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Articles from
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To check out Facebook’s Marketplace, click on the Marketplace link in the left-side menu on your Home page (it has a little storefront icon). This brings you to Marketplace. See what’s on the market.Marketplace has its own left-hand menu and search functionality across the top of the page. The bulk of the page is taken up with the listings.
Celebrating birthdays on Facebook is a great way to show your friends you care about them. Facebook birthday celebrations are fun, inexpensive, and easy to do. Here's how: What to Do What It Is How to Do It Write on a friend’s Timeline. Formerly called the “Wall,” this public forum usually fills up with well-wishes on a person’s birthday.
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.
Facebook is one of the dominant social networking sites in the world. Facebook lets you share photos, videos, links, status updates, and much more with your friends. As you discover how this social networking site works, use this handy reference to help you find people on Facebook, communicate with friends, and figure out what to do as soon as you log in.
Facebook offers users a Trending section to keep up to date. If you consider yourself a news junkie or are just someone who likes to know what everyone’s talking about these days, you’ll probably enjoy paying attention to the box labeled Trending on the right side of your News Feed.Trending topics shows headlines that people are talking about across all of Facebook.
For as long as there’s been a Facebook people have found ways to use it to drum up support for a cause. Virtually every feature has been co-opted at one point or another for causes both serious and silly. People changed their profile pictures to a photo of their school mascot long before Facebook made it easy to put a temporary frame around your profile pic.
Now that you know what you can do, generally, on Facebook, it's time to consider some of the specific ways you may find yourself using Facebook in the future. The following list is by no means comprehensive. These are more specific-use cases than an advertisement for Facebook’s features. Two billion people use Facebook, but not all of them can see your whole Timeline.
Often people use their Facebook profile pictures as way to show solidarity with something that’s happening in the world. This can run the gamut from expressing sympathy for victims of a natural disaster to supporting certain legislation, to rooting for your alma mater during football season.Frames are the easiest way to modify your profile picture for these reasons.
An app is a term used to describe pieces of software that use Facebook data, even when those applications weren’t built by Facebook. You may use apps as games, websites, and useful tools, all of which make use of the data you already share on Facebook. To make it easier to get people using these applications, they import the data from Facebook.
Facebook’s News Feed is designed to learn about what you like and whom you care about and to show you stories accordingly. As you use News Feed, it learns what you like based on your clicks, comments, and likes. You can give News Feed more information to work with to make News Feed even better for you. Hiding posts and people There are ways to tell News Feed explicitly who you do and don’t want to see.
You can start a fundraiser for any reason at any time. Often current events will inspire people to create fundraisers — whether that’s linking to a big charity like the Red Cross after a natural disaster or donating to a memorial fund after the death of a friend or loved one. Another common time for creating a fundraiser is around one’s birthday.
If you’re trying to create a listing for something you want to sell on Facebook, you can easily do so by going to Marketplace and following these steps: Click the blue Sell Something button in the upper-right corner of the page.This opens the Sell Something box. Create a listing here. Enter the item’s info into the appropriate space.
A popular way to use Facebook is to find people from your past or get to know friends of friends. To find people you know on Facebook and to build your Friend List, check out this table, which outlines a few easy ways to do just that. What to Do How to Do It See which people in your e-mail address book or instant messenger (IM) buddy list are on Facebook.
One of the best parts of using Messenger is the ability to easily start voice and video calls with your Facebook friends. You don’t need to be using the same type of phone, or even both need to be on a phone (one of you can be on your computer). To start a video call, open a conversation with the friend you want to call, and tap the video camera icon in the upper-right corner of the screen.
Listen to the article:Download audio The search box at the top of Facebook's site allows you to search for a specific person by name. You can use it to find people you're already friends with and you just want to go to their timelines, or to find people you aren’t friends with yet.But basic search can be a little confusing because Facebook auto-completes the names that you type and assumes you’re trying to get to your friends’ timelines.
In addition to Marketplace, many people use Buy/Sell Groups on Facebook to buy and sell used items. You can use both (and, in fact, Facebook makes it easy to post Marketplace listings to Buy/Sell groups you belong to and vice versa). Usually people tend to use Buy/Sell groups for the following reasons: Groups require membership: Because members of a group must actively join that group, this acts as a bit of a filter on both the number of people who will see your listing and the type of buyer/seller you are interacting with.
Facebook’s Marketplace is easy to browse and use on your phone. To get to it (assuming you are using the Facebook app on an iPhone or Android), tap on the Marketplace icon at the bottom of the Home page (it looks like a little storefront) to start browsing through Marketplace.Use your finger to scroll up and down and browse.
Most Facebook users have a smartphone, or at least one with some capacity to use a browser. However, if you don’t have a phone like that, you can still use Facebook via text message. To get started with Facebook Texts, you first need to enter and confirm your phone number in the Settings page from your web browser: Choose Settings from the Account menu (down arrow) in the upper-right corner of the big blue bar on top.
What if you don’t want to worry about the small privacy settings on Facebook and who tagged what when? What if you just want to make sure that your Timeline looks the way you want to your friends and that people who aren’t your friends can’t see anything you don’t want them to see?Well, the good news is that the View As tool allows you to do just that, and the Activity Log tool allows you to keep track of everything that’s been happening recently and to make any needed adjustments without trying to figure out which setting, exactly, needs to be changed.
My Day is the equivalent of the Facebook Stories feature found in the Facebook app. Basically it allows you to share tidbits of your day (usually photos and videos) with your friends who use Messenger. Photos and other things you post expire in 24 hours and don’t leave a permanent record behind.From the Messenger Home screen (where you see a list of your conversations) tap the Camera icon toward the top of the page—this particular Camera icon says Add to Your Day underneath it.
Facebook adds items to this section as you use Facebook. For example, if you start to spend a lot of time posting and commenting on a particular group, Facebook will automatically add it to your Shortcuts section. Over time, you may wind up with more shortcuts than easily fit in this space, at which point Facebook will choose the five shortcuts you click most often to display, and the rest will be hidden behind a blue “See More” link at the bottom of the Shortcuts section.
Photos and videos of yourself int this context refers to photos and videos in which you're tagged on Facebook. Tags are ways of marking who is in a photo — the online equivalent of writing the names of everyone appearing on the back of a photo print. Tags are part of what make Facebook Photos so useful. Even if you don’t add lots of photos, other people can add photos of you.
While Facebook tries to take some of the guesswork out of buying and selling your used items online, the fact remains that you will be interacting with someone you don’t know. Here are a few basic safety tips to keep in mind: Watch out for scammers: If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Don’t let people upend your common sense.
If you lived in the U.S. during the 2016 Presidential Election, chances are you heard a bit about Facebook and how it related to the election. There were two main parts of this: the proliferation of fake news headlines and the simple exhaustion many people felt (on both the right and the left) with what felt like constant political battles waged in comment threads between friends and strangers alike.
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