50 Great Facebook Tips and Tricks

This post is a collection of some of the best apps, tips, and tricks I have discovered from countless hours of research into facebook and the facebook ecosystem.

The tips and tricks in this post come from the firefox plugin directory, the userscripts database, and facebook itself.

If you know of any additional facebook tips and tricks worth sharing let us know in the comments below!

1. Create a Custom Username for your facebook Profile or Page

For example, the custom url of my personal profile is: http://www.facebook.com/garinkilpatrick/

You can customize the URLs of your own facebook profile and pages by surfing to: http://www.facebook.com/username/

2. Export your facebook Status Updates via RSS or Text Messages

If you go to facebook.com/notifications you will be able to choose how you would like to syndicate your status updates, as RSS or Text Messages.

3. Import your Tweets as status updates

With the Twitter app for Facebook. This app will import all tweets as status updates, which may alienate your fb friends with useless @replies if they do not have twitter.

4. Schedule your Status Updates on facebook and Twitter

Sendible.com is a site that allows you to import your contacts from a variety of address books, and schedule status updates to multiple networks.

Status updates supported by Sendible include: your Facebook Wall, Facebook Page, and other Social Media sites like Twitter and Linkedin.

5. Sync Photos of facebook Friends with Microsoft Outlook Contacts

OutSync is a free Windows application that syncs photos of your Facebook friends with matching contacts in Microsoft Outlook.

This application allows you to select which contacts are updated.

With this app you can update all contacts at once or just a few at a time.

6. Customize your facebook Page

With the Static FBML app by faceboook.

Using this app you can create a custom “welcome” tab for your facebook page, customize the sidebar of your wall, and more!

7. Export your facebook Events to your Google Calendar

Add your facebook events to currently logged in Google Calendar.

8. Download your facebook Albums from Friends, Events, and Groups

FacePAD is a plugin for Firefox. better known as the Facebook Photo Album Downloader will allow you to download your friends’ entire Facebook albums with a click of a button.

9. Flickr to Facebook

An unofficial Flickr to Facebook uploader (bookmarklet).

This app allows you to easily upload photos to Facebook from Flickr.

10. Upload photos to your facebook account with Picasa

The Google owned Picasa comes complete with an uploader app for Facebook.

This app also gives you the option of uploading the Picasa captions and resizing your photos before uploading them to facebook.

Add a simple button to Picasa that lets you upload your photos straight to Facebook! You can put photos in an existing album or create a new one.

11. Export the emails of your facebook friends as a .csv list.

Facebook turns emails into images so until recently there was no easy way to download the emails of your friends without manually copying them all out. Luckily before I did this I discovered the video below.

The video above shows how Yahoo offers a service that will automatically pull all of your facebook emails into a coma separated list.

12. How to: Remove facebook Advertisements

This Greasemonkey Plugin script – Facebook: Cleaner removes many of the annoying ads and updates that otherwise will appear on your Facebook pages.

13. Import Selective Tweets as facebook status updates

After you link the Selective Tweets App with your Twitter account, any tweets you select will be sent to Facebook.

Select tweets for facebook by using the hashtag #FB in your tweet and it will appear also as a Facebook status update.

14. Access facebook chat on your desktop

Chit chat for facebook is a desktop messaging program for Windows.

This msn style chat program delivers a better experience than the browser based version of facebook chat, since it is not stuck to the bottom of a browser.

Chit chat offers tabs for managing multiple conversations at once.

If you are a Mac user you should check out the widely popular program Adium since it integrates facebook chat, and msn messenger!

15. Use facebook Chat Emoticons

Here is an image showing all of the available Facebook Chat Smileys and Symbols.

16. Manage facebook Chat with Lists

Friend lists on facebook make it so you can appear online to some friend lists while appearing offline to other lists of friends.

If you only wanted to talk to your best friends, for example, then simply create a list called best friends and leave in online, and set all other lists to offline.

In the image shown to the left you will see that I have only three of my lists online.

Due to lists in the image in the left I have only 114 of my fiends online at the time I took this screenshot.

Any friends who are within my offline lists will appear offline to me, even if they are online.

17. Update Facebook via SMS Text Messages

If you already have facebook synced with your phone you can send a status update by sending a text message to 32665.  Syncing your phone with facebook is a simple seven step process.

1. Login to facebook.
2. Click on Account, and account settings.
3. Click the Mobile tab.
4. you will see a link for “Register for Facebook Mobile Texts”. Click this link and fill out the information requested, including your cell phone number.
5. A text message with a confirmation code will then be sent to your phone.
6. Add in this confirmation code at the website listed in the text. At this point you are registered to update your Facebook message with texts.
7. Now you can update your status by sending a text message to 32665.

18. Get Facebook summary updates via email

A great way to stay connected with facebook via a free service called nutshellmail.  Nutshell mail delivers well designed facebook updates, and offers a similar service for both Twitter and Linkedin.

19. Update your Facebook Status from Firefox

Firestatus is A status update utility for multiple social networks, including Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, delicious and more.

20. Download the Facebook app for your phone

Simply browse to m.facebook.com from your mobile phone, and you will be able to access the mobile version of fb.

21. Get detailed statistics of your facebook friends with Socialistics

Socialistics is a comprehensive social insight tool.

This facebook app provides an integrated analysis of your friends and networks.

All graphs are a reflection of stats relating to your friends.

But more interestingly Socialistics creates detailed tag clouds that are a reflection of you and your relationships with people in your networks.

This isn’t Top Friends. It’s much more. It’s an attempt to start understanding who you are within the network you operate within.

22. Automatically Poke Friends that poke you

Yes it’s possible, all thanks to a little Greasemonkey script called Facebook Autopoke.

I am hesitant towards this app.  What if someone you don’t want to poke pokes you?  Do you really want to automatically poke them back?

If you maximize your poking potential and are comfortable poking anyone this app is for you!

23. Upload photos and video to Facebook via email

Go to facebook.com/mobile and note a special “upload” email address that has been assigned to you by facebook.

Any photograph (or video clip) that is sent to this address via email will instantly get posted to your facebook page.

24. The Konami Code

By entering the konami code you will see a cool lens flare effect that will impress and your friends.

By entering these keys:

Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Enter.

You will activate the famous Konami code, which unlocks secret areas of many well known websites.

Entering the Konami code in Facebook causes the Website to Enter Lens Flare Mode:

Try typing or pressing Enter for special effects.  This is a cool trick, but gets annoying soon.  Just re-enter the code to deactivate the effect.

25. Pirate English

Yarrr matey!

Change the language of Facebook to English (Pirate) BETA.

Make yaaar status updates walk the plank.

26. Update Facebook from Google

This app allows you to view your Facebook news feed and update your status from iGoogle. According to the comments this app works great in Firefox, but not Google Chrome.

27. Find all of your Facebook friends on Twitter

After you export all of the email addresses of your facebook friends (see tip #11) you can import them using twitter’s find friends tool, so that you can connect with your facebook friends on twitter.

28. Keep your friends with you as you surf the web

With the social web browser flock (built from mozilla technology). http://www.flock.com

29. Access Gmail from Facebook With Fmail

Fmail allows you to check your Gmail without leaving Facebook.

Additionally, Fmail attempts to rate your email, so you can quickly differentiate between what’s important and what can wait.

30. Flip your status update text upside down

With fliptext.org

31. Download Facebook Videos

with Downfacebook.com

This site offers two options for downloading videos from facebook, both of which are very easy to use.

32. Get all your facebook notifications right on your desktop

With FBquick.

FBquick is a quick and easy way to get all your facebook notifications right on your desktop.

33. Ping Facebook and all other major social networks at once

With ping.fm.

34. Get quick access to many popular features of facebook

with FBookFriendMenu

Press ALT while pointing to a profile or picture of a use to do common tasks such send poke, message, view album etc.

35. Auto-Colorizer for Facebook

This script adds a custom color scheme to facebook based on profile pictures.

36. Create a collage of Photos of your friends

With the Photo Collage app.

37. Get Facebook and other Instant Messaging in one Program

Digsby is a cool program that integrates email, IM, and Social Networks.

38. The Reviews App for Facebook

With the Reviews App for Facebook, your friends and customers can leave honest opinions about your business.

Reviews lets your prospective fans know what to expect with you and can influence people interacting with your business.

39. Automatically login to Facebook

With Facebook Autologin v2 by installing Greasemonkey for Firefox and this script.

40. Facebook Share Button integration within Google Reader

This Greasemonkey script Places an expandable Facebook Sharer into each Google Reader item so that websites can be shared with Facebook friends and on a Facebook profile from Reader with a couple clicks

41. Advanced facebook Search Features

Not everybody knows how powerful facebook search is.

Facebook search has a lot of advanced options to help you search like a pro.

A complete list of search tips for Facebook can be found in the Help section of facebook.com.

42. Facebook Dashboard Widget for Mac OS X

Dashboard Widget is a widget developed for the Mac OS X dashboard. It is designed to show notifications from the Facebook website.

43. The Superlatives App is Fun

http://www.facebook.com/superlatives

44. Send RSS Feeds to Facebook Pages with RSS Graffitti

RSS Graffiti is an app that periodically checks the RSS feeds that you specify and posts new entries to the Facebook Walls that you specify.

You can get any feed written on any wall. In fact, multiple feeds to multiple walls. You choose the combination.

This app is used by Seth Godin to bring his blog into his facebook page.

45. Manage Facebook Status Updates and Multiple Twitter Accounts at once

With Tweetdeck.

Tweetdeck is the most popular Social Media desktop tool.

They enable multiple account management and facebook status updating.

Make sure to check out my Ultimate TweetDeck Tutorial on garin.tv.

46. Check out: Facebook for Influencers

Facebook for Influencers is a useful resource developed by facebook, about how to build an effective facebook presence.

This facebook page is for anyone who wants to build a presence, engage an audience, and spread a message.

47. Check out: the Facebook App director

There are hundreds of apps recommended by facebook within the facebook app directory.

48. Export albums to facebook from iPhoto [Mac]

Facebook Exporter for iPhoto is a free plugin for iPhoto that enables you to export photos directly to Facebook, with captions and tags of your friends.

The plugin requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later and iPhoto 5 or later.

49. Customize your Facebook profile page sidebar

If you are looking for the right icon to link with check out this facebook icon collection.

50. Install a Facebook Like button into your WordPress Self-Hosted Blog

I just implemented this tip on this very page, as you can see below.

To do so I went to Plugins/Add New, and then searched for: “facebook like button.” I installed three different plugins but none worked well with my theme.   I decided to stick with the share button at the top of this post.

I recommend installing code for each button manually. Facebook provides a like button building tool that is quite easy to use, and generates code to copy and paste automatically.

You can get a like button by going to the like button plugin page within the facebook developers portal.

If you have a WordPress blog better way to install this feature into all of your posts and/or pages is with the wordpress plugin: WP FB Like. I installed over five facebook like plugins and this one was the easiest to configure, so I recommend it.

If you don’t want a “like” button you can change the verb to “recommend”, as the image above shows.

5 Facebook Hack Codes & Tips To Show Off Your Geeky Skills

#1– Aye, Make Yer Profile a Pirate’s Page You Landlubber!

The second profile hack is also one of the easiest to implement. Facebook offers users the ability to transform their Facebook pages into any language that they like. If you scroll down to the lower left corner of your profile page, you’ll see your current language setting. Click on this, and you’ll have a list of all languages available to you. Notice the English Pirate option?

Ahoy matey – yer now a Cap’n! Now as you go through your profile page you’ll notice some pretty hilarious pirate variations.

Now, the wall is the Plank, your profile is the Cap’n’s Log, and you can now either click a post as pleasin’ to me eye (like) or blabber t’yer mates (comment).  It certainly removes the “boring” factor from your old standard Facebook pages.

#2 – Upside Down Status Updates

If you’ve been on Facebook long enough, you’ve probably noticed a few people posting upside down status updates. They sure do think they’re clever don’t they?!  Yes, you too can be the envy of all of your friends and family by posting your updates so that people have to look silly by tilting their heads upside down so they can read it.

Most of the people you’ve seen doing this have likely installed a Facebook app just to do so. However, I dislike installing apps because you always have to provide permissions to those applications to access your profile. A better approach is to use the free online application at FlipText to generate your upside down status update.

Simply copy the upside down text from the lower text box, paste it into your Facebook status box and post!

#3 – Download Complete Photo Collections From Your Friends’ Profiles

If you have a lot of friends on Facebook, you may not have the time to keep up with all of the new family photos they’ve posted – but you are very interested in them and would love to have them stored in your own private photo collection to review later. Well, thanks to a very cool FireFox plug-in called FacePAD, you can do just that. The add-on is awesome, and I would recommend that anyone with the resources to do so should send in a contribution to Arthur Sabintsev for his efforts.

After you install the FacePad plug-in, make sure you select Tools->Add-Ons, and configure the options for FacePad so it has your correct Facebook language. Then, all you have to do is go to your friend’s photo albums, right-click on the title and select “Download Album With FacePAD.”  That’s right, you’re not downloading a single picture – but an entire album.

Once you do, FacePad downloads every single image within that album into the download folder you’ve configured in FireFox. Don’t forget to organize all of those photos using JetPhoto, as recommended earlier by Jeffry.

#4 – Schedule Facebook Status Updates With Sendible

Do you like to keep your Facebook profile active, but you’re coming down with a cold and may be offline for a few days?  Maybe you’re taking a trip and won’t be anywhere near a computer for a week. Or maybe you’ll be playing hooky from work and traveling, but you want your colleagues and boss to think you’re stuck at home sick. Accomplish any of these wishes by using Sendible to schedule your Facebook status updates. This is an application Daniel covered earlier, so check out his article for more details.

But for Facebook specifically, once you sign up with Sendible, just click on Facebook and provide your Facebook login details. Sendible connects directly with your Facebook account. The, under “New Messages” click on “Status Updates“.

On the next page you can schedule out as many updates as you’d like! This service is awesome – and you can distribute scheduled updates to a number of social networks including MySpace, Blogger, Twitter and more.

#5 – Hide Your Online Status From Certain People

Look, don’t feel bad about it. When I first joined Facebook I left my online status wide open. After a couple of weeks of getting inundated with nonstop chat requests, I simply turned off my online status completely. Problem solved. Except, there really were certain people I wouldn’t mind hearing from – is it really fair for a few chatterbox buddies to ruin your chances for communicating with everyone? Well, there is a way for you to selectively block your online status from certain people.

All you have to do is open up your chat icon in the lower right corner of your Facebook display, click on Friend Lists, and create a new list called “BlockList.” Make sure after you create it that it’s configured under “Display these lists in Chat.”

Now, all you have to do is either click “edit” and add the friends you want to block, or if they’re already online, just click their name and drag them under this new list. Once you’ve got everyone there who you want to block from see your online status, hover your mouse over the green dot to the right and click on “Go Offline.” Now, you appear offline to only those certain friends.

Facebook, unlike MySpace, is not really easy to tweak – which is actually a good thing. Gone are the days of those horrid eye-bleeding pages with pink flashing backgrounds and instant music that you can’t turn off. However, the tweaks and plug-ins in the list above offer at least a few ways to customize your Facebook account and usage to suit your life and your personality.

How do you use Facebook? Are there any hacks or add-ons not offered here that you especially like to use? Share them in the comments section below!