Why You Need Facebook Lists

Recently I was corresponding with a friend who, like me, uses a facebook fan page to promote his website. While discussing his strategy it became apparent why you really need to use facebook Lists to organize your friends, whether you have a fan page or not.

While you could let your fans accumulate through their own volition, you can accumulate fans much faster if you Friend prospective fans and then invite them. But having many friends has its drawbacks, even for those whose Friends are legitimate, which is not necessarily the case when you’re using facebook as a promotional tool.

Facebook used to display all your friends posts on your facebook Home page, but that stopped when Facebook decided that it would determine what Top News posts would appear on your facebook Home page. Even with a reasonable amount of Friends, you’re not guaranteed to see everything they post. If you’re accumulating Friends at a rapid pace in order to turn them into fans, then the problem becomes even worse. First of all you have no way to segregate who you actually want to correspond with from who you simply want to broadcast to. And lastly you will eventually max out at 5000 Friends.

That’s why you want to use Lists to manage your Friends.

The best way to segregate your friends into lists is when you first make a Friend request or confirm a Friend request. For your existing Friends you create new lists and manage who belongs to which list by clicking Account, Edit Friends. Friends can belong to multiple Lists.

You’ll want to use Lists to keep track of how and why you became Friends with them in the first place and to identify the ones that you want to correspond with regularly. You may even want to divide the latter group into tiers.

Once you have your Friends organized into Lists, just go to your Home page and in the sidebar on the left click Friends to expand your Lists. Clicking each List will show you every post by that List’s members.

And when you need to reduce your amount of Friends or decide who to invite to what, knowing why they are your Friends in the first place will be very helpful.