Facebook

Once you’ve got started with your basic information and your Timeline has sprung to life, you’re ready for some friends. Many of your work colleagues, family, classmates, neighbours and their dogs will already be on the network (we promise) you just need to find them.

As your friends list grows, Facebook will be able to suggest potential friends in the ‘People You May Know’ section. This is based on your current connections and their network.

You can enable users to subscribe to your profile which publicises updates within your timeline. This feature, obviously, is useful for celebrities and other public futures who would like to interact with fans without giving access to their full personal profile.

Again, you can control what information people see and this makes the Subscribe feature very valuable in terms of marketing yourself and being a lot more transparent to prospective employers - remember to make sure everything is appropriate!

Once you’ve logged into Facebook, the first thing you'll see is your News Feed. This is made up of your friends’ status updates, photographs, shared links and even what relationship has just ended (yes, people do share that information!). Your news feed is based on your activity and displays what Facebook thinks that you find important so you updates appear in order of importance not most recent.

Before you begin searching for friends, it’s important to complete your personal profile (Timeline). This includes everything from uploading a profile picture and cover photo to adding the films that you’ve watched, books you’ve read and places you have been as well as adding your relationship status… Okay, that’s optional.

Your profile is set out as a timeline (most recent first) and includes milestones, memories and key dates in your life. It is encouraged that you include as much detail as possible and many, many people do - so, don’t be shy. Just make sure it’s the right detail and not last night’s salad!

A status update is your way of sharing something with your Facebook friends. You can tell people what you are doing, where you are and even who you are with. You can also share photos, videos, links and even create a poll - remember who your friends are and what they (or an employer) actually want to see. Again, your dinner isn’t important.

Within Facebook you can tag another user within a status update, photograph and comments. This will then notify that user and appear on their timeline. This created additional connections between friends and another way to communicate based on something that they’ve seen or done and, as you can imagine, this can be good and bad.

We’d advise that you are very aware of your tagging privacy settings within Facebook and adjust these settings to allow you to review tags before they’re posted. This will give you full control of what is published to your timeline which is super important!

Facebook privacy settings is hugely important and we could create an entire webpage on this feature alone. However, with your time in mind, we’ve pulled together the main aspects that you need to be aware of:

• Public profile: You have complete control over what any type of Facebook user sees. Nearly every feature within your profile can be set as public, friends only or only you and you should utilise this to make sure everybody sees only what you would like them to see.

• User privacy: If you have several different friendship groups within your Facebook friends you might want to add these groups to a particular list. This will allow you to choose what updates, posts and tags of you that they can view - your football buddies may care about your thoughts on last night’s game but your work colleagues may not!

• Third-party applications: When logging into certain applications such as Spotify using Facebook it needs to access information on your profile. They will ask for permission before you begin using the app but this can be turned off if you are unsure of the privacy risks attached.