To begin I would like to introduce you to Kylie Willison. Kylie is amongst other things a South Australian, genealogist, facebooker and blogger (you can keep up with Kylie’s own happenings on her blog BLOG, BLOG, BLOG).

She has very kindly written our first ever Guest Blog Post. All about Facebook, this article is aimed at those who who haven’t yet taken the plunge into the world of Facebook, or those that have only just dipped their toes in.

Kylie takes you step-by-step through the process of setting up an account, adding friends, ‘likes’ and more …

Anyway I shall let Kylie get on with telling you all about how to get started …

Millions of people use Facebook every day to keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, share links and videos, and learn more about the people they meet.

Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to “share and make the world more open and connected”. www.facebook.com

According to Wikipedia:  “Facebook is a social networking website launched in February 2004 that is operated and privately owned by Facebook Inc. with more than 500 million active users in July 2010”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook

The first step to using Facebook is to sign up for a FREE account.  Fill in your details in the sign up form and click Sign Up.

Type in the security check words and click on Sign Up.

After you complete the sign up form, Facebook will send an email to the address you provided. Clicking on the confirmation link in the email will complete the sign up process.

You will also receive an email titled Welcome To Facebook.
Click on the green Get Started button in the email.

The first step is to add any friends who may already be using Facebook.  Facebook shows you a list of people it thinks you might know.  If there is anyone in the list you know and would like to be friends with then click on the Add As Friend button next to their name.  All friendship requests need to be confirmed so your friendship connection won’t be established until the other person confirms that they want to be your friend.

Step two is Find Friends.  This step is more confusing to new users than it is useful so I recommend skipping this step.  Click on Skip This Step and we’ll move on to step three.

Step three … It is entirely up to you how much or how little information you put into Facebook.  You’ll need to think about this seriously.  You can always go back later and put in some more information if you feel that it’s okay.  Put in your information and click Save and Continue or put in no information and click Skip.

It asks you again if you would like to add any people you know.  You can skip this step for now and we’ll come back to it later.

Now to step four uploading your profile picture.  Again it’s your choice if you want to upload a picture of yourself, one of your pet or maybe a funny picture you’ve taken.  It needs to be a picture which you own though.  You cannot upload to Facebook pictures which belong to other people, trademarks, adult content, pictures of famous people (unless you took the photo yourself).  I use pictures of myself and from time to time change it to pictures of my pets.

Click on Upload A Photo.  I’m not going to discuss taking a photo with your webcam, it would make this article too long.

Click on Browse and Facebook will look at your computer’s hard drive.

Go to your Pictures folder and choose a picture you would like to use.  Click on the picture file and click on Open.

Here is your profile picture on your Home page.  For this article I used a picture of a cute dog.

Facebook guides you through putting more information into your profile.  The information you put in your profile will be viewable by everyone on Facebook.  You can change this in the privacy settings to be only viewable by friends.  Enter the information you want in your profile, again you can go back and change this at any time.  Scroll right to the bottom of the screen and click on Save Changes.

After setting up your profile you can start using Facebook.

Most people communicate with their Facebook friends via their status updates.  Status updates range from the sublime to the ridiculous.  It’s something you have to see to believe.  Updates are short snippets of information, they can be about yourself, your family and your activities, comments on the weather or your hobbies.  It’s entirely up to you.

Type in your status and click Share.
Read what’s in the box and click on Continue.

This is your profile page.  All things about you are on this page.  There are three tabs at the top of the page underneath your name.  They are Wall, Info and Photos.  The wall contains your status updates, the info tab has information about you and the photos tab contains your photos, if you choose to upload any.  Friends can write on your wall and you can write on theirs.

In the top right hand corner of the screen it says Home, Profile, Account.  Click on Home to go to your Home page.  Each time someone in your friends updates their status it shows up here on your Home page.  Friends also share video clips, music clips, and links to interesting websites.

So now that Kylie’s given you the step-by-step details on how to go about setting up a Facebook account, what are you waiting for? There’s a world of family and friends out there waiting to keep you up to date.

Not only that, but it is a great way to keep up with the latest news of businesses, groups and other organisations. If you wish to follow Gould Genealogy on Facebook, you can do so by going to http://www.facebook.com/GouldGenealogy and click the ‘LIKE’ button. Any of our updates will then appear in your timeline, so you’ll always ben kept informed of the latest happenings.