Facebook: Pages, Profiles and Whatever!

kah22

As a senior I’ve been in lockdown for sometime and more to kill an hour or two I started messing about with Facebook. I’m a member of one or two closed groups and have my own Facebook Profile, Page or whatever it is called for an individual! That’s part of the problem.

I want.to use Facebook for some light fun but, like everyone else, I like to see that Like or Share button pressed.

To that end I thought I’d have a look at what’s out there and maybe try to form an idea of what people post (not copy).

Posts and Profiles are what confuses me. I started off by search for Popular Facebook Posts and was presented by an array of commercial material.

OK I thought I need to search profiles but again the search engine seems to return Commercial Material but that’s not surprising - Facebook is there to generate income and it has to be paid for

So the question is, how do I find what guys like you and me are posting.

At the moment I have a small number of friends and followers. My posts generally centre around current affairs with satire thrown in for good measure.

I’ve tried loads of search terms but business type pages keep appearing, any suggestions as to how I might see what ordinary humans are talking about?

pramsay13

Facebook is (or should) be a way of taking online what you would normally do in person with your relatives / friends.
If you normally talk about the weather just talk about the weather and add photos of it.
If you talk about football, do that.
You can then join groups or follow pages that are specifically for your interests. 
If your contributions are better than most people will start to like / share them.

J_B

You are trying to understand how facebook works, but don't overthink this as nobody knows

I try to sort my FP page to show 'recent posts' but then, when I go back to 'top posts' it shows some that are more recent - go figure!

Neil_Jones

Facebook changed the way they show posts now, in favour of showing you more posts from people/pages/groups that you interact with and less from that you don't.  When they posted becomes irrelevant after a while, and if you want to see what Uncle Fred posted more often you need to interact with him more.  But even then that doesn't guarantee you'll see his latest post of a trip to Margate with the dog.

feolojad

Don't worry, Facebook algorithms will soon figure out your likes and dislikes and fill your feed with lots of posts from like minded people and your own personal echo chamber will come along in due time as Facebook play even more mindgames to keep you on their site to serve you ads that they get paid for.

May I suggest watching the film Social Dilemma? It is filled with the people involved in social media right up to vice president and CEO level going on about all the psychological stuff social media uses to keep you going back and some of the not so nice experiments Facebook has done from time to time. Suffice to say much of the ills of the world can be put down to them and the way they run their networks for the pursuit of profit has resulted in a threefold rise in suicide in teens and pre-teens over the last decade. If you know the mind games they're playing then you're less likely to get caught out by them or at least try to mitigate them.

kah22

Some interesting replies

jon81uk

Most people have their profile privacy set so their posts can only be seen by friends. So if you don't have many friends on Facebook, thats why you mainly see commercial posts as those are public. Facebook is generally used to share things with friends, or post in a group where its a community of people with the same interests.

If you want more public posts anyone can read, then Twitter is what you want.