Some Very Useful Facebook Tips and Tricks

Facebook can be a little tricky at the best of times and there are often things that you think would be easy but really aren’t! I’ve put together some of my favourite tips and tricks for using Facebook, whether for business use (pages) or personal use (profiles)

Suggesting a page to all your friends

You would think that Facebook might have an option for suggesting a group or page to all of your friends, but they don’t. Obviously it won’t be the case that every time you’re suggesting a page, it will apply to all your friends but if it’s a good or fun cause, this would be useful. Here’s how you do it!

1. Clink on the suggest/invite link on the side of a group or page

2. When you’re presented with the option to select your friends one by one, paste this code into the address bar of your browser and replace 200 with the number of friends you have :

javascript:elms=document.getElementById('friends').getElementsByTagName('li');
for(var fid in elms){if(typeof elms[fid] === 'object'){fs.click(elms[fid]);}
if (fid == 200){break;}}

3. This has now selected all your friends and you can just click send.

Allowing fans to tag photos

This isn’t a default option on a Facebook page and is something we often get asked about. It’s easy when you know how..

When you’re in your page, click on ‘edit page’. Scroll down to photos and click ‘edit’, then ‘edit setting’s at the top of the photo page. You can then just select ‘Allow all fans to tag photos’. You can’t directly tag fans yourself, unless they are friends of your profile, but you can invite them to tag themselves.

Embed a youtube video on a tab

You may have found that you can’t embed a youtube video using fbml, but there is a workaround!

Within the fbml tab of your page, you need to paste this code :

fb:swf swfsrc="http://www.youtube.com/v/pTQOCVe00Cg&hl=en_US&fs=1&"
type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"
width="330" height="220" imgsrc='http://location of your image' width='330' height='220'
waitforclick='false'

In order for the video to display correctly, replace the youtube url above with the url in the embed code for your youtube video. You will also need to replace “http://location of your image” in the above code, with a url of where you’ve hosted a still image of the video, for example on your server or a site like photobucket. Users will need to click on this in order to start the video. I promise it’s easier than it looks!

Using Facebook search

You may all be seasoned searchers on Google, but you can also apply a few tips and tricks to your Facebook search to return more suitable results. If you want to search for more than one person in the same search, for example then you can do so by entering a pipe in between each name, for example Lauren Fisher | Niall Harbison . You then see both the results in the same SERP

There’s a host of other Facebook search tips here.

Claim your vanity url

It may seem straightforward, but we still get asked this a lot! In order to claim your vanity url for a profile or page, just visit facebook.com/username and follow the instructions to set a vanity url for your profile or page. Note – you will need a mobile handy as Facebook will send you a confirmation code.

Download entire albums from your friends

This is a brilliant firefox extension that allows you to download an entire album from your friends in one single click. Developed by Arthur Sabintsev, FacePAD can be downloaded from here

When it’s installed, simply go the photo album you’d like to download, right click on the title and click on download :

Please feel free to share any tips or tricks you know about, in the comments.