Tips to Procrastinate with Facebook like a Pro

We can all admit to spending a lot of time on Facebook. This is even more evident when you have work to do. Reading that business report or putting the final touches on that important presentation seems to take a backseat to Facebook. As a matter of fact, it’s often when there’s important work to do that it feels like we want to see what Facebook friends are up to, or want to post about that vacation. This may just be inevitable, but here’s how you can make your Facebook experience extremely effective.

Filtering Friends

Do you have a Facebook friend that posts far too often? Maybe there’s not a headline that goes by that this friend doesn’t forward. Maybe this friend posts what he ate at each and every lunch or what she thinks about every reality show on cable television. You want to block this friend’s posts. And you want to do it without resorting to a de-friending.

There is a function in Facebook which will allow you to unsubscribe from this friends updates. You can do this directly from your news feed – all it requires is that you hover over that friend’s update with the cursor, click the down arrow that appears in the upper-right hand corner of the update, and then select the option to “unsubscribe from status updates.”

Extending Messages, not Friendships

There is also a way that you can send a message to folks on Facebook, even when they are not already your Facebook friend. This is dependent on if they have allowed it in their settings – if they have, then you can do this from their Facebook profile page. Just navigate to their page and click on the “Message” button on the upper-right hand corner.

Also, were you aware that you are able to connect Facebook Chat to other services? It’s true. If you are a Hotmail user, you can link your Windows Live profile to Facebook. This lets you chat with online friends from your mail window. You can do the same with instant message services such as Yahoo messenger. Simply search Facebook for information on how you can connect your chat programs to the service.