Procrastinate with Facebook like a Pro

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We can all admit to spending too much time on Facebook. This is even more evident when you have work to do. Reading that business report or putting the final touches on that important presentation seems to take a backseat to Facebook. As a matter of fact, it’s often when there’s important work to do that it feels like we want to see what Facebook friends are up to, or want to post about that vacation. This may just be inevitable, but this is how you can make your Facebook experience more streamlined.

Filtering Friends

Do you have a Facebook friend that posts far too often? Maybe there’s not a headline that goes by that this friend doesn’t forward. Maybe this friend posts what he ate at every lunch or what she thinks of every reality show on tv. You need to block this friend’s posts. And you must do it without resorting to a de-friending.

There is hope, since Facebook permits you to trim the content you receive in your news feed and filter out updates from specific sources. Find an update from a person you’d like to eliminate from your news feed and click on the arrow that shows up when you move your mouse’s cursor over the top right side of the update. A menu will show on the screen. Choose “unsubscribe from status updates” for that person to block messages.

Extending Messages, not Friendships

Another little known tip is that you can send messages to people who are not Facebook friends – of course, this requires that their settings allow this. To do so, all you need to do is navigate to their Facebook profile page, then select the “Message” button that will be located on the upper-right corner of their page.

Also, did you know that you are able to connect Facebook Chat to other services? It’s true. If you are a Hotmail user, you can link your Windows Live profile to Facebook. This allows you to talk with online friends from your mail window. You can do the same with instant message services such as Yahoo messenger. Simply search Facebook for information about how you can connect your chat programs to the service.