Right now, Facebook and Twitter are the two social networks I use most to keep in touch with my listeners, friends and family. Twitter is great for short updates, but Facebook allows for richer communication and sharing. In this post, I will tell you how to organize your friends in groups so you don’t get overwhelmed.
Since I have been using Facebook, the number of people that are following me has steadily grown to almost 3000 friends. Whenever you allow someone to befriend you, you can choose to see his or her news updates on your Facebook homepage.
The problem is obvious: how can you possibly keep track of all those updates? Sometimes there are over a hundred new items each hour in my newslist!
As in real life, your social contacts can be divided into several groups like concentric circles.
There is the broad neighborhood, people you cross and greet on the street – but you might not know them very well.
There is a group of people you see more often; in my case for instance, my parishioners, collegues, or fellow podcasters.
And there is an even smaller group of close friends and family members.
Is there a way to make that same division in Facebook, so you can take a closer look at the updates of just one of those groups, instead of just watching the endless feed of updates from everyone?
There is! And here is how you do it:
1. Click on ‘Home’ in the Facebook menu. The default setting lets the page display the general News Feed.
2. In the menu on the left, click on ‘more’ to display all options, and on the bottom of the list, select ‘+ Create’.
3. Enter a name for your new list. For example, “Podcasters”, or “Priests”.
4. Next, you click on the pictures of any of your friends to add them to that particular list. Click again to deselect. You can type a name in the search window to quickly select a particular friend.
5. When you are done, click ‘Create List’. The new list will be added to the menu on the left. You can now drag it to a new position to change the order of the menu. If you place the list at the top of the menu, you will see the updates of that list as the default on your home page.
That’s it, you’re all done! Hope this helps to bring some more order into the social networking chaos in which we live 
I did this a few months ago and it finally made Facebook useful again. Very nice to have just a “Family” group. I kept missing updates from them but now I never do.
How do you edit a list after it is made? I forgot to click some people in some categories.
I had done it already as well. The only thing is that one only gets the latest updates, so… for example, one of my family members might not have posted in a long time while another one does so more frequently and the updates that I will see first will be those of this later one, which is obvious. But, then I have to keep clicking at the end of the page to see older posts. I wish Facebook would just present a LIST of all the members in THAT category and then I would go directly to that family member. Not sure if I explain myself clearly.
You have officially made my day better by sharing this tip!! Thanks for the ease of instructions – so simple and yet such a revolutionary change for me! Thanks for the great post – I hope I made one of your lists!!
I did this a few months ago and it finally made Facebook useful again. Very nice to have just a “Family” group. I kept missing updates from them but now I never do.