There are many settings in Facebook and tasks to do to organize your friends. After joining Facebook and applying the settings important to you, it is a good idea to organize your friends, family members and business contacts. Each contact is its own sub-account that has its own settings to manage as well.

Customize Your Facebook Lists

The ability to customize my own Facebook Lists is one of my favorite features. It is great to organize family, friends, acquaintances and co-workers into manageable groups. It makes communication easier to direct to relevant groups. If you have friends you meet with or share a common interest with you can group them into a list to represent your club or team. If you need to exclude a few groups from public postings you can easily do so as well.

My favorite is going to my list of lists and viewing posts from a particular Facebook friend list in its own News Feed. I can quickly touch base with whatever group I care about the most in a given moment.

To add a friend to a list, visit your Timeline, select the Friends area on your Facebook Cover and when your cursor hangs over a friend’s name select the Friends button and add to a list. Select Show All Lists if you have a number of them. If it is easier for you, you can visit each friend’s Facebook Timeline.

Friends can be added to more than one list which is helpful if a few individuals are part of more than one of your social circles.

Review Your Friend Settings

After adding a friend to the appropriate Facebook List in your account, take the time to review each friend’s settings. You can also tweak the subscribe settings on which posts you care to see from each individual. If you don’t care about their Facebook gaming activities you can suppress that from your News Feed.

To update friend settings do the same as adding a friend to a list. After selecting the Friends button you will see an area to select Show in News Feed or select Settings. You can customize the following in each of your friends’ news feeds: Life Events, Status Updates, Photos, Games, Comments and Likes, Music and Videos, Other Activity.

Manage Friend Posts in Your News Feed

Sometimes it is easier to wait a while and review the posting habits of your friends on your Facebook News Feed. There is a down area in the right-hand corner of each Friend post. Hitting this button gives you the ability to Hide story, Report story or spam, adjust Subscribed settings for the friend (All Updates, Most Updates, Only Important) and Unsubscribe from friend or from the type of post they posted (Life Events, Status Updates, Photos, Games, Comments and Likes, Music and Videos, Other Activity).

Essentially, organizing your Facebook friends helps you keep your Facebook News Feed organized as well. Not only can you communicate in an organized fashion with your Facebook friends, you can see only the communications you want to see in your News Feed.