The recent news that Facebook has hit the 3 million user mark inspired me to sign up for an account. While I have a LinkedIn account, I heard that Facebook was different so I had to check it out. The cool part of this “experiment” was that (unbeknown to me) I was the perfect candidate for Facebook, because according to InformationWeek people over the age of 24 are its fastest-growing demographic on Facebook.

As a newcomer - and because I wanted to get it right - I sought guidance from the folks at Spunlogic who are Facebook veterans. Below are my ten simple things to do/be aware of if you decide to the take the plunge.

1. The registration process is open to all users. All you need is an email address. NOTE: Your date of birth is a required field. Since I found this a bit too personal, I got slightly creative with the date.
2. Easily connect to those you already know by granting Facebook temporary access to AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), Yahoo! or Gmail email accounts. Facebook can easily add existing friends to your profile from these accounts during the setup process.
3. Search for friends from work, school, or social groups; but be selective. Unlike MySpace, Facebook is not about how many friends you know – it is about connecting to those that you want to keep in touch with, so don’t add every person that you find.
4. Let the crowd guide you in application selection. Similar to MySpace, you can add applications, or widgets, to your Facebook page based on your interests. Facebook posts alerts to your page whenever a friend adds an application, and I found this to be the perfect way to discover new widgets that I hadn’t considered.
5. Be careful who you poke! Yep, you are reading this correctly – you can poke another person. “Poking” grants to the person that you poked temporary access to your profile, so “don’t poke the bear!”
6. Send an email notification to your friend without copying all of their addresses. A big frustration with email is that people have multiple accounts so you have to copy each account to make sure that they get it. One of the hallmarks of social networking sites is that you can send a message to a friend (without even knowing their email address) and they will get notified. It’s just that simple.
7. Put a name with a face - on a picture. One of the coolest features in Facebook is the ability to identify who’s who in a picture by tagging them.
8. Update your Facebook “status” without a computer. Once you add your cell phone, you can send use SMS messages to update both your Facebook profile and send messages to your friends. In fact, by entering ‘@ changing his status using his phone.’ and sending it to FBOOK (32665) I discovered that my new status displayed “Tomer is changing his status using his phone.”
9. You can limit what you share with others. The availability of personal information has raised some privacy concerns on Facebook. To combat this, you simply can tweak your privacy settings, where you can block users or limit what personal information a specific user has access to. To learn more, you should check out the Privacy page on the Facebook blog.
10. Write on someone’s “wall.” As you would in the real world, you’re expected to check in with friends … in the case of Facebook, it’s posting messages on other friend’s “walls” (their Facebook page).

After a couple of weeks on Facebook, I’m finding that I really enjoy the experience. I’ve actually started to reconnect with high school friends that I lost touch with or wasn’t able to connect with through other social networking sites (ie: Linked-in). Since I’ve still got a ways to go, I would love to get your thoughts on “newcomer “ tips for getting more out of Facebook.

Additional Resources

Facebook Etiquette

Being Productive with Facebook

Upcoming Facebook Conference

Facebook course to be offered in Sanford