What can a Facebook List do for you?

[last updated August 2018]

Have you ever been annoyed about the selection of items that land in your News Feed? We know Facebook has algorithms that decide which posts to show you, based on how popular they are and other factors. Early on in the history of the Feed, I grew annoyed at missing things from good friends, just because their posts didn’t have loads of likes or comments or because I hadn’t talked to them recently.

Enter the List. Facebook has this option to help you organise your friends. You can make as many lists as you want - I have two main ones, one is tiny for when time is tight, the other a little larger.

How to start your list: From your main page, go down the left sidebar until you see the heading called Explore. Under that is an item called Friend Lists. Click on that, then on "Create List".

A window pops up for you to name your list and add people. Don't worry about remembering everyone, you can go back and change list members later (or just make a new list). Include all the people whose posts you never want to miss. When you’re done, click Create and the magic begins to happen.

Now you are redirected and will land on “on” the list page. Take a look at your browser’s address bar – that’s the list’s unique web address. Go ahead and bookmark that link, stick it on a button in your bookmarks bar…

Then, anytime you want to go to FB, just click that button and you’ll go straight to the most recent posts from your prioritised people.

It’s certainly very useful once you get more than a few hundred contacts. Inevitably, you’ll know some better than others, and be closer to some than others. Those not chosen can still interact with you on your posts, and there’s nothing stopping you from clicking through to the regular feed anytime you like.

I currently have about 200 people on the lists that I keep up with completely. That’s about as much as I can manage from day to day. To everyone else, I’m very sorry – but I far prefer this solution to unfriending you! I still want to keep you in my wider circles and maybe someday something deeper will spark.

Ah, but who is on this list of yours, I hear you ask?

Nope. That’s my secret!

Top 10 Tools for Online Living

The Internet's a crazy place. Over the years I've developed an arsenal of strategies to handle it and stay sane, too. Originally I was going to call this the Top 10 Online Tools for Writers, but in fact, they are essential for pretty much anyone who spends time interacting online. Some require a little techspertise, however, you'll soon find that it's worth it - they save so much time.

1. Email filtering - When you sign up to mailing lists or join groups or social networks, the amount of notifications landing in your inbox can be overwhelming. You can create folders and have messages from certain addresses or with certain keywords go straight there instead of clogging up your front page. Of course you can also opt out of notifications, but if you do want them, they don't have to swamp you.

2. RSS reader - I've already talked about this, but in brief, you can add all your favourite blogs to a service where you can then peruse their titles like email subject lines. Only read the ones you are interested in - and you don't have to visit every site individually!

3. Facebook Landing List - Hundreds of friends? Their posts will only appear in your News Feed if Facebook's algorithm deems them worthy - decided by factors such as overall response to a post, or how much you interact with that person. But you can make a custom list with a subset of priority friends, then use that location as your landing pad and never miss anything truly important again.

4. Instant Messaging - There's nothing like it for teamwork or a bit of a chat. 'Nuff said?

5. Blog Scheduling - Statistics prove that certain times of day are more effective in gaining attention. Not around at those times? I'm not, because I sleep away most of the American day. So I schedule my posts for advantageous timing and head off to dreamland.

6. Blog Syndication - This is where it gets really powerful. A scheduled blog post, appearing while I sleep, triggers a Tweet on Twitter, two Facebook posts (one on my personal feed and the other on the Splashdown Books page) and one on Google Plus. Each with a link to the blog post and most with a preview image. In addition, post comments can appear as activity on Google Plus as well. To say nothing of the full post being pushed through to my Goodreads and Amazon profile pages. That's at least six different appearances for each post!

7. Free Phone Calls - Skype and Google Talk allow for international contact like never before.

8. Pinterest - I am still figuring out this one. But I must be doing something right, since I often get 20-30 repins and likes per day. The image's clickthrough link should always go to its original source, but my thought is that if I include a link in each pin's description, it can travel very far as it gets repinned - because people rarely bother to change the existing description. The trick now is to find a blog post or book of mine that is relevant to that pin.

9. UnPolitic.Me - Triggered by keywords of your choice, replaces Facebook posts with an Instagram feed of your choosing. In my case, I replace political comments with Doctor Who images. You may want to clean your feed of cats (perish the thought!), or babies, or food - this tool can do all of those things and more.

10. AdBlock Plus - Makes the Internet a nice place by removing all those junky advertisements.

So there we are. I'll write up a wee comment on each item in the weeks ahead, and link them here when they're done. What are your favourite online tools?