Transcription:

Hello, and welcome to another free tutorial video brought to you by BeyourownIT.com. Today’s lesson is going to be on how to make a Facebook account. Obviously, tens of millions of people already have Facebook, but it still continuous to grow and grow, and there are a lot of questions when people want to get on to Facebook for the first time, and they don’t quite know what to do.

The setup is actually quite simple. Just go to Facebook.com, and you’ll see they have a really easy signup right on the front page. We’ll create a test account. Hopefully everything works because I didn’t do a dry run on this. I got sick of creating multiple Facebook and MySpace pages.

Put in all your information. If you want people to be able to find you by your email address, make sure you use one that people know. Keep your password in a safe place. You can select your information here, and sign up.

They’ll want to have you verify just like anybody. This is, again, to prevent spam and bots from creating a million Facebook pages, and then spamming the heck out of everybody. It starts the wizard just like anything else. It’s going to ask you, “Hey do you want me to go in your email account and see if we can find your friends and family? People that you email?”

It’s a quick, easy way to get to add people. A lot of people do it. We typically don’t like giving out our email password to people. You can fill out your school information here. You can add as many schools as you want. Again, you can always go back and do these things.

Let’s set your profile picture. You can upload one from your computer, or if you have a webcam you can take one right there‑‑very cool feature. Just like with MySpace and any other social media type of page, remember anything that you put on here is public information, and don’t put anything out here that you don’t want your parents to see, or your friends or co‑workers, boss, whatever. Keep that all in mind before you throw up pictures of you doing a beer bong at the Brews or at the baseball game or whatever, unless you’re cool with everybody seeing that.

This is the screen that you’re going to see. This is going to ask you to confirm your account, so you just have to check your email, and confirm it ‑ which I’m sure they’ve already sent me. It will say “Facebook account confirmation.” You can just click that and confirm it.

Then you can start doing all sorts of things. You can go to Home, Profile, Friends, or Inbox. In Friends is where you will find friends. Facebook probably does the best job of anybody in suggesting friends and actually coming up with the right people. It has the ability to import people off AOL Instant Messenger, Windows MSN, or Windows Live Contacts. You can search by school, by graduation year, by anything. You can find pretty much anybody who happens to be on here.

As far as your profile goes, you can view it; you can edit your profile right here anytime. You can edit your personal information. Obviously, mine looks very bland because I didn’t really fill in any information.

You can start installing applications, you can write on your own wall. You can go to your wall and share whatever happens to be on your mind for that day. In a way, it’s like Twitter. You can post a link of some videos, photos, all really easily. It’s a good way to keep in touch with everybody. They will help you a little bit on the bottom.

That’s really creating Facebook. If we go and confirm this, it’s going to say that we’re confirmed and we can invite friends, we can edit our profile. Again, it’s very, very easy. You can install applications ‑ anything.

That’s really how you create a Facebook account. The way people find you is by going to Facebook.com backslash whatever particular username you picked. The way you can do that is you go to your account settings. You can fill in your real name and your username. Your username is going to be what it uses for Facebook backslash and then whatever you happen to put there.

You can deactivate your account here. You can control your privacy and do all sorts of things like that. Privacy settings is really nice if you want to enable people to search. You can do all sorts of things. You can block people here. It’s best just to get in here and take a look around and get used to it.

Facebook is a great tool, although it’s starting to get spammy with the marketers moving in. It’s important that everyone knows how to create a page and get out there and find your old friends and family. I know that I’ve been able to connect with a lot of people that I’ve pretty much forgotten about. That’s the allure of it. Hopefully this helps you get started.