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Mentorship December 18, 2016
How often do you mindlessly scroll through your Facebook home screen, browsing through pictures and posts about your friends’ lives? You convince yourself that you just want to “catch up” with everything, but after what seems to be about an hour, you come across a picture of your high school best friend, boasting about how she’s trekking the world with her new beau.
Instead of indulging in the new book you bought a week ago, you convince yourself that it’s absolutely necessary to create a mental timeline of her life. So you divert your attention off your homepage and onto her profile. What countries has she visited? How long has she been together with her partner? Eventually, you get bored and move on to the next subject. Your college roommate, perhaps?
As great as it is to keep up with all your friends, that is not the only thing you can (or should) use Facebook for. Here’s how you can upgrade your Facebook to help you be more productive with your time.
READ MORE: What You Need to Know About Your Privacy on Facebook
Instead of simply browsing through posted photos, try sending a message to people you haven’t spoken to in a while. Ask them how they are doing or even extend an invitation to hang out. Facebook made it easier to keep in touch by creating a separate Messenger application where you could receive all your messages in one convenient and efficient location on your phone. With the Messenger app, you can share videos, articles and gifs you enjoy and you can even give your friends a call.
According to Forbes, LinkedIn is not the only useful job search tool. “At 1.23 billion users, Facebook is nearly five times the size of LinkedIn, which has 259 million members. For that reason alone, job seekers should tap Facebook’s professional networking power.”
According to Dan Finnigan, the CEO of Jobvite, you should start by filling out your Facebook profile with your professional history. Then, create different lists to sort your friends on your friend lists. Finnigan suggests creating one called “Professional” or “Work” to sort out all your professional contacts. This allows you to share articles and posts related to your professional interests directly to your professional friends.
Finnigan suggests that you use Facebook to find networking connections. You can do this by typing the company name into a search bar. After you do that, you’ll see a pull-down list that includes “My friends who work at X Company.” Find the friends you have who work there and then view their friends to see people you can connect to. According to Finnigan, “You will hit a networking goldmine.”
READ MORE: 5 Reasons Social Media Skills Help Your Job Hunt
These three are just some of the big things you can do to help you be more productive on Facebook. Facebook, however, has a number of other things to spice up your daily Facebook routine. Here are some quick suggestions from Huffington Post:
Since Facebook recently altered some of its algorithms, you now have greater control over what you see on your dashboard. According to Mashable, “You can choose to view only photo-related posts, music-themed updates or posts from pages and people you follow via Subscribe (as opposed to simply users you’re friends with).”
If you’re interested in global news, you can subscribe to news sources such as BBC, NPR, NBC or FOX on Facebook to get notified every time they post a story. Or you can even use the Facebook search bar to search trending topics like “#Oscars” to see all news stories related to that. Facebook allows you to have a variety of information in one place; instead of searching online through different news sources for coverage on one story, you can go to Facebook to stay updated.
READ MORE: Instagram and Facebook Do Their Parts to Help Prevent Suicide
