Facebook Best Practices - Creating Facebook Lists part 2 (Interests List)

Welcome back to the second post on good practices to have in Facebook as a user. In the last post I spoke about Friend lists - creating a list, adding friends to the lists and also benefits of it. Similarly today we will look into Interest lists.

As lists are grouping of things on Facebook, Interest Lists are grouping things of your interests or basically grouping pages and people of your common interest and have a dedicated feed. An additional feature was we can share this list with our friends, subscribe to public lists of others. Yes similar to twitter. Isn't it cool?

So, looking in detail about creating of Interests Lists. If you don't see Interests section on your left side column in Facebook homepage. Open this link and create one to have the section.

So, for instance we will create a Interest list called Classical Music to see the possibilities and benefits of having a list.

As I hit the create list button in the link, it shows few options from pages and friends to choose before naming a list. Its upto the user to choose any or start one without choosing any. And it can be a mix of both friends and pages as we discussed before. In the second screen, I gave the name as Classical Music. Here again we can see three options 'public' 'friends' 'only me' . Choose any of it according to your list purpose and hit Done.

I choosed it to be public. We will see the benefits of it. And now we can see the Interest lists in the left column. 

And the managing the list that is adding new pages or friends is very much similar to the friends lists we saw in our previous post. So, keeping that apart, We will now see

• What is 'who can see this list'? (public, friends, only me)
• How do I share the lists?
• How this follow and lists related?
• And few more benefits of organising your interests into lists.

Who can see the lists you created?
While you are creating any list, it prompts us to choose who can see the list you create. You can choose the list to be public, or to your friends or even you can keep it to yourself. The lists created by others in public mode and by your friends are supposed to be shown to you while creating a list. But I am not able to see that these days. It was there when this Interests feature was introduced in 2012. You can check the Mashable article for reference.

How do I share the lists? or Let my friends and public know about the wonderful list I created?
When you go on to the list page, you will see a share button on the right. So, you can share this list to all your friends by posting it on your timeline or by posting it your friends timeline or by posting it on any of your pages you are managing or in a group. Basically it acts like a general share button. And so, others can click and open the list and choose to follow if they are interested.

And others can choose to follow the list you shared.

Relation between facebook Follow and lists: 

Before coming to the very point of relation between follow and lists. First we should clearly understand that, there is no need to like a page nor be friended with a person to add them to your list. That means, you can check the updates of a person or a page without being friended or liking that page in your list. This is definitely a downside for marketers as they can not have a count on likes. But there is also a brighter side as lists can be shared to others and followed by other users, users might get an exposure of a new page in that industry they were listed on. 

Ok, coming to the point of follow and lists relation - As a user can be added to a list without be friending with them, a user who only allowed everybody to Follow him/her can be added to the list. 

So, if you want to be added to anyone's lists and allow them to see your public posts, you need to allow everybody to follow you. 

And few more benefits of organising your interests into lists.

• You will never miss an update of a page or friend in the list. 
• You can choose what sought of updates you want to have in the list. Hit Manage List button for that.
• One common list can be made and shared among the group of friends of same interest.
• It will be a very effective social listening tool to have as you can maintain a list of all pages or people you want to keep track of in your industry or area to keep yourself updated. 

So, friends this is all about the lists. If you could spend few moments to organise your interests lists, it helps in keeping you upto date about everything. As Facebook Edge algorithm doesn't apply for lists. 

Have a great day!