Create or manage ads you’ve posted to Facebook.
Ad Choices: See the Facebook Help pages, where you can learn more about how Facebook targets ads to you and what you can do to adjust what ads you see.
Cookies: Sadly, clicking this link doesn’t make chocolate chip cookies suddenly appear in your hand. Instead, it brings you to a page that explains how Facebook uses web cookies, or stored data on your web browser. Cookies are used on many websites to keep your experience more convenient and to deliver ads to you.
More: Access a menu of more links. Click any of the following options to navigate to different parts of Facebook:About: Facebook’s About page is where you can learn more about Facebook’s products, the company, and what it’s been doing in the news lately.Careers: If you’re considering applying for a job at Facebook, check out its careers page first.Developers: If you're a software engineer looking for ways to build apps that use Facebook, click this link to learn more about the Facebook platform.Help: A duplicate of the choice in your Account menu, this link takes you to the Facebook Help Center.
Right On
The right sidebar contains a few sections for other shortcuts that might be useful to you as you use Facebook.
Sponsored
Ads are an inescapable part of using Facebook. You’ll see them in various places across the site — in your News Feed, mixed in with stories, and in this section of the right sidebar. You don't need to do anything with this section except let it do its thing, showing you ads. You can learn a bit more about Facebook’s ad policies and controls in Chapter 6.
Your Pages
Pages are special profiles created for businesses and public figures, as well as anything else that is not an individual person that requires a Facebook profile. Pages are covered in depth in Chapter 14. If you’ve already created a Page (or Pages) you can get to them quickly from the Your Pages section of the right sidebar.
Birthdays
If any friends have birthdays coming up, you’ll see reminders about them in the right column. One Facebook norm is to write on a friend's timeline to wish him or her a happy birthday. Click your friend’s name in the Birthdays section to display a little window that allows you to dash off a quick note.
Contacts
The last section is a list of your friends, sorted by people who are currently active on Facebook. Clicking a name will open a chat window at the bottom of the screen. Much like the top bar, this chat window will stick around no matter where you go in Facebook. Unlike the top bar, however, you can minimize or close chat windows if they are blocking your view. Chats are part of Facebook Messenger; when you close a chat window, you won’t lose any of the messages that have been sent back and forth. You can learn all about Messenger in Chapter 9.
Part 2
Day-to-Day Facebook
IN THIS PART …
Logging in and reading News Feed
Sharing posts, photos, and links
Managing your privacy
Using Facebook on your mobile phone
Chapter 4
Reading News Feed and Posting
IN THIS CHAPTER
Sometimes after we’ve explained to people about the basics of Facebook — it’s a website that lets you connect and share with your friends — they follow up with an obvious question: “But what do you do with it?”
The answer to that question is both simple — you keep up with your friends — and complicated. So many tiny actions and interactions on Facebook add up to a sense of being surrounded by your friends — and that sense of friendship keeps people coming back to Facebook day after day (and, with smartphones, minute after minute).
This book tells you how to do virtually everything you could ever want to do on Facebook, but chances are you won’t do some of them — such as create a photo album or plan an event — every single day. As you go about your day online — reading articles, watching videos, shopping, and more — you’ll check in on Facebook, find out news big and small from your friends and the Pages you follow, share a few of your thoughts or observations, and go on your way. This chapter covers these basic activities in depth.
The main way people find out news and generally keep in touch on Facebook is through their News Feed, the constantly updating content people post to their timelines. If your friends create stories, which are a certain type of post that disappears after 24 hours, you can see what they are up to right this moment, more or less. We talk about News Feed at length in this chapter and about the ways you interact with what you see there. Your News Feed isn’t just about reading the posts you see there; it’s also about comments and likes.
You can also keep up with friends by sharing your own content — status updates, photos, links to articles you read, and more. You can post your own content and create your own stories from the top of your News Feed. And your friends will, in turn, be able to see, like, and comment on what you posted.
Your Daily News … Feed
News Feed is the centerpiece of your Home page. The top bar and the left sidebar are there when you need them but are meant to fade into the background so you can focus on your News Feed.
So what is News Feed? It’s the constantly updating content and actions on Facebook of your friends and the Pages you follow — such as writing a status update, sharing a photo or link, or fundraising for charity. See the “Common actions and content” section, later in this chapter, for details. In addition, stories have their own section on top of your News Feed and disappear from Facebook after 24 hours.
Back in the day, a common refrain around the Facebook office was, “News Feed is a robot.” More accurately, News Feed is an algorithm. It doesn’t show you everything from your friends; instead, it shows you things it thinks
