… And Facebook for All – Your Profile Page, Part II
It’s something Facebook members have seen hundreds, if not thousands, of times. It’s your profile page.
Let’s talk some more about your profile. Here’s mine.
In addition to the basic tabs at the top, it also contains:
- A space for your profile picture
- Information on any mutual friends you might share with anyone peeking at your profile
- A small subgroup of your friends
- Your likes
- also, your photos
- Your links
- A share button, and,
- Some ads
NOTE: Facebook continually A/B tests, and so buttons and features move, change, are resized, added, or can disappear altogether. Your neighbor can sometimes see a rather different version of Facebook versus yours. And this is normal. But these elements have been there for quite a while. It’s a safe bet that many of these account settings will stay on your FB profile page.
Let’s look at these in order.
A Space for Your Profile Picture
No one is stopping you from putting up a picture that is not, actually, of you. As a result, I’ve seen dogs on Facebook, scenery, people’s children, and cartoon characters and more. Hence it’s a place to be somewhat expressive.
However, recognize that, if you’re using Facebook at all for your business (or if you’re simply looking for work), you’ll need to tone this down.
If you want to go fairly conservative (which I personally think is best but opinions differ), go with a headshot or a head and shoulders shot that’s fairly recent. And, do make sure you’re smiling.
Mutual Friends
If someone surfs in and finds your Profile Page, they’ll probably be drawn to whether you’re really the person they’re looking for, and whether you have any acquaintances in common.
If you’ve got a somewhat common name (e. g. Gregory Cole), then it’s really going to help out people if they see anyone who you know is in common with whoever they know.
One way I’ve used this information has been in locating High School friends, as we tend to have the same mutual friends.
If I see that Jane Smith is also friends with John Jones and Dave Brown (names are made up, of course), then I realize, aha! Chances are good that Jane and I attended High School together. Or, at least, she’s from my area.
However, sometimes it just means that Jane is a local (if John and Dave stayed in the area after graduation). Or it might mean she’s a younger or older sibling of my classmates. Hence it’s an imperfect system.
A Small Subgroup of Friends
So this is six friends (fewer, if you have fewer than six friends, of course). And it used to be you had control over this, but apparently not anymore.
As Facebook gets larger and larger, aggregations like these start to go the way of the dodo. Why? Because Facebook is really just a big, honkin’ database. With 2 billion daily active users, all these displays, with their sortings and re-sortings, are going to get memory intensive rather quickly.
It will never, truly, be a bare bones platform a la Twitter. But you can expect to see some aggregative niceties to go away over time, or to be aggregated even further.
After all, how many times have you seen only the so-called “most relevant” comments instead of all of them when you click on a post. That, my friend, is saving Facebook some valuable memory.
Your Likes
Whenever you click Like on a group or page, it can show up here. A few show up at a time, and they rotate. To take something out of rotation, un-Like it. Much older and inactive pages and groups show up less, as Facebook follows social signals in this area, too.
E. g. pages and groups that appear inactive or even downright abandoned will lose precious visibility time and space to groups and pages that are up to date and lively.
Photos on Your Profile Page
So here is where your profile picture shows up in all its glory, and bigger than on your Home Page. Therefore, make sure it looks good here as well as on your Home Page. What I said above bears repeating.
If you’re using Facebook for business (or if you’re looking for work), make sure your profile image is a flattering photo clearing showing your face. It need not be full-length (and, if it is, it’ll be smaller on the Home Page, but here it’s all visible) and, for God’s sake, smile!
Plus, photographs also show up on your wall if you upload them and agree to publish them to your wall.
Your Links can go on Your Profile Page
So put a link in your status, or post it to your wall, and it will convert to something clickable. And if it comes from Youtube, it’ll even embed the video. And like most things on Facebook, any link can get comments or “Likes”.
A Share Button
Actually, there are several of these. Pretty much everything on Facebook can be shared in one manner or another, and even off Facebook.
Bottom line: your Profile Page is your face to the world. It is clickable, shareable and somewhat searchable. Don’t want people to know something about you? Don’t put it on your Profile Page.
Want More About Facebook?
If this article resonates with you, then check out my other articles about the largest social media platform on the planet.
Facebook Features:
- Your Account Settings
- Your Home Page
- Profile Page, Part 1
- Company Pages
- All the Rest of It
- Offsite Sharing