Facebook for Unbelievers

Facebook has become the world's most successful social network; but while the younger generations have embraced social networking many baby boomers and older persons cannot see the attraction and are not interested or even actively hostile to Facebook.

However, here is the thing ... It is no coincidence that most corporations and charities are now actively participating in Facebook. Facebook's new tools, formats and business and organizational pages have made it very easy to use Facebook to stay in contact with your customers or supporters. I have discovered that it is an ideal tool to use with my networks and associations, so my problem is how to engage all those baby boomers and seniors who want nothing to do with Facebook. So here now is my guide to Facebook for unbelievers.

Most Facebook Unbelievers are either concerned about: sharing personal information, being exploited by Facebook, or wasting their time with a lot of other people's trivia. It is however, easy to control all these risks. I use Facebook regularly but I am not the least interested in telling people about all my activities or in hearing about all of theirs.

Firstly, you have control over who you accept as "friends" and then when you do accept someone as a friend you can control to some extent what information you see from them.. This is useful because Facebook is very useful for me to keep track of my nieces and nephews who are spread all over the world but I certainly don't want to see all the rubbish they post. In Facebook when something appears in your news stream; hover over the heading and click on the down arrow that appears on the right. You will then be presented with a menu of options to control or suppress all things that you see in future from that person.

If you are really worried about privacy, or being exploited by Facebook, here is my advice:

First open a new free email account with Gmail, Yahoo, or Hotmail (you can set this up to forward emails to your normal email address)then use this account to open your Facebook account. When you open your Facebook account give your real name but either skip everything else or lie. Not even Google can identify you by just your name, in an Internet with billions of users there are no unique names.

Then only add friends that you really want to keep track of and LIKE corporate and organizational pages that you want to keep receiving information from. You then just need to log on to Facebook at least once a week to keep track of the news.

This level of Facebook engagement would not satisfy today's young people but it will enable you to use Facebook as a useful tool on your terms.