Getting Started with Facebook

OK, so for my first lesson, I am going to show you how to get started with Facebook:

First step — Create Facebook account

1. Go to www.facebook.com
2. Enter your name, email address, password, sex, and birthday (they need your birthday to verify your age; you must be at least 13 to have a facebook account)
3. Click on sign up
4. Enter the words listed in the security check (if you haven’t seen these before, they are just verifying that you are a human)
5. Click on sign up
6. Facebook will then send a confirmation e-mail to your e-mail address
7. You will need to log into your e-mail and click on the link in the e-mail from facebook to complete your account creation
8. Once you click on the link in the e-mail, your account has been created

Facebook will now prompt you to find friends through your e-mail address book. You can enter your e-mail password here and let it find friends from your e-mail contacts. We will talk more about that in facebook 201, so I am going to skip that for today, click on skip this step.

Second step — Enter school and work information

1. If you want to, you can fill in your high school, college/university, and company information here along with graduation years. This will make it easier for you to find others that went to school with you or work with you.
2. Click on save if you filled in the information or skip this step if you didn’t

Third step — City/Town network

1. You can enter the city/town that you live in to add you to that network. This will help you find other people on facebook that live near you.
2. Click on join if you entered your city/town or click on skip this step.

You now have the option to search for people you know (click on find people you know) or enter additional profile information (click on view and edit your profile). I will post about finding people you know in facebook 201 and editing your profile is pretty self explanatory.

Fourth step — Privacy settings

I wanted to include this in my first lesson because I think you should look through all these settings and make sure that you are only sharing what you are comfortable sharing. One point to remember is that you will have to approve all your friends, so anything that you set to friends only, you will have control over who sees it. Also, you can make changes to these settings at anytime.

1. Click on settings on the upper right-hand corner
2. Click on privacy settings
3. There are 4 sections to the privacy settings; profile, search, news feed and wall, and applications
4. Click on profile
5. Profile (basic and contact information) –for each of the options listed you have 3 or 4 choices (only friends, friends of friends, networks (this will not be a choice if you did not enter a city/town in the network), or no one)
6. Change any of the options that you want to under basic and contact information
7. Click on save changes
8. Click on privacy
9. Click on search
10. There are three parts to the search section; search discovery, search result content, and public search listing
11. Search discovery this controls how you can be found if someone searches for your name on facebook
12. Search result content this controls what people can see when they find you in a search
13. Public search listing, by default this box is checked. If you leave this box checked, someone can find you on facebook and see the items that you have checked in search result content when they search your name on search engines (i.e. Google)
14. Change any of the options that you want to under the search sections
15. Click on save changes
16. Click on privacy
17. Click on news feed and wall
18. News feed and wall controls what is shown on your wall (what your friends can see when they go to your facebook page)
19. Change any of the options that you want to under the actions within facebook and social ads sections
20. Click on save changes
21. Click on privacy
22. Click on applications
23. Read the overview
24. Click on settings
25. Change any of the options that you want to under the settings section
26. Click on save changes

You have successfully completed your first lesson and created your facebook account. Please leave me comments if there is anything that you are unclear about.