Doesn’t Facebook and productivity sound like an oxymoron? Most people don’t go to Facebook to be productive. As us who are in business, the mere mention of Facebook sometimes mean hours of time suck with little or no rewards.

Ah, but I beg to differ! Like the in real life, Facebook is about the company you keep. I’m in a few high quality groups where excellent resources are shared on a daily basis. Some help me hone my coding skills and others have information I would like to return to for a later project. There’s certainly some good stuff on Facebook and it can also be a time suck. Here are some things I’ve discovered to help me do, get in and out quickly until I’m ready to unwind.

Bookmarking Posts

Even though you can now save links, images and videos in Facebook, you still can’t save posts. But sometimes, the best information is contained in a post or the comments that follow. How to solve that? Each post has its own URL. That means you can bookmark it. On the post you’d like to save, look for the date it was posted or how many hours ago the post was published. This is usually on the top right next to the photo.

Click that and it’ll be taken to a page displaying this post and its comments only. Now you can simply bookmark it or copy and paste that URL for sharing elsewhere e.g. Emails.

Bookmarking Comments

Similarly, you can bookmark comments as well. Again look for the date the comment was posted or how many hours ago it was posted. For comments, this appears at the bottom of the comment. Once again. Just click on that to load the URL and bookmark. Super useful for posts where there are hundreds and thousands of comments.

Receiving Notifications For Posts You Didn’t Comment On

We all know that when you comment on a post (or put one out yourself), you get notifications. What happens when you see a thread that you find intriguing. You don’t want to put your two cents in but you do want to watch where the conversation leads. That’s easy. Just get notifications to it.

First, find the post in question. Click the downward arrow on the top right corner of the post. Then, click Get Notifications.

To turn it off, simply return to this post to click on Stop Notifications.

The above screenshots show you a post from a group. If you are looking to receive notifications of friends’ posts, this may look a little different. See this post below. The Get Notifications link is a little lower in the drop down list.

Stop Notifications For Popular Posts

What about those times when someone gets engaged, has a baby, bought their first home, or lost a family member, is ill? You say congratulations or I’m sorry. Next thing you know, you get tons of notifications for every congratulations, I’m sorry, or like. Keeping notifications down on hot posts is a great idea. I do it a lot. To do it, you follow the same steps as before.

Locate the post, click the drop down, click Stop Notifications.

Find New Groups To Join

Sometimes you may want to insert yourself into the market, and help others in order to gain some visibility. Joining groups, much like being helpful in forums could do that to a certain extent. The key is to find a handful of quality, active groups. What better place to start than the groups your friends are in. Do this by searching for Groups my friends are in. As you can see in the screenshot above, all you need to do is start with the right keywords and Facebook helps you along.

Get To Know Your Audience Better

Facebook Graph Search is super powerful and a wealth of information for you to get to know your current audience, your target audience, and even your competitors’ audience better. Some searches you can try are:

Favorite pages of people who like your page(s)

Favorite pages of people who like an affiliate partner’s, friend or competitor’s page. Here’s one for Coach Glue.

Apps likers of your competitor’s page, your page, or any page use

Favorite books of people who like your page, friends’ page, competitor’s page, any page

Find Posts You Engaged With

There are times when you want to refer back to a post that you commented on or liked in the past. The Activity Log is where you’d find that and a ton of other information as well. First, click on Activity Log.

Then go to Comments, Likes or Photos.

Shortcut To Favorite Groups, Pages or Apps

If you have a handful of groups or Pages you visit daily, you can also favorite them by simply going to Groups or Pages or Apps and hitting the Favorite button. Or in the listing on the left, click the gear icon.

Favorites will appear directly under your name and picture. You can then remove them or rearrange them.

Share Only With Certain People

Sometimes, you want to make an announcement but you don’t want people you work with to see. Or, you want to share business related stuff but don’t want to bore your family and friends. At time of share, you can choose Custom. This will pull up a dialog box of who you want to include or exclude.

The faster/easier way is to simply group your friends as you befriend them. For example, as you can see above, I have a custom group of Church friends. I have more that aren’t shown, e.g. Professional – that means for business. When I share something that is highly targeted to those people, I’ll select them.

Just be sure when you post next this setting is not set to the same group. One time when I did this, the setting stuck so every post I made after was only seen by these people only. I had to go back to change the visibility.

Have hacks you use commonly? Share them below.