Basics: Facebook tips and tricks

With a Facebook account full of friends and lots happening in your News Feed, it’s time to unleash the full power of social networking!

The most important part of the Facebook page is the notifications bar. This alerts you when someone posts a reply to a comment you’ve made, sends you a message, or adds you as a friend. Red numbers next to an icon indicate how many notifications of that type you’ve received.

The Facebook notifications bar alerts you to new activity on your Facebook page.

Click on an icon to show a list of recent notifications, then click on the notification to jump to that person’s profile.

Keep it personal

Privacy is a big deal on Facebook, since you could potentially be showing all your photos and posts to the world!

You can use the inline privacy bar to set which people can see any post, photo or video you put up on Facebook. Privacy options in your account can be set to cover everything you do on Facebook.

A good setting is to ensure your information, posts and photos can only be seen by ‘Friends’, not ‘Friends of Friends’.

A stranger visiting your Facebook page will only see your profile picture and some basic info, until they try to add you as a friend.

Privacy settings allow you to control who sees your personal information.

If you reject a friend request, don’t worry. The person making the request doesn’t get a rejection notice. The same goes if you delete a friend. They won’t know they’ve been deleted until they try to visit your page again.

You can see all the friends you have by clicking on the Friends link, and then clicking ‘Manage Friends List’.