So, today some job searchings reminded me that I'm clueless about Facebook so I made up a fake account and went through it a bit and while I find Twitter as an awesome tool, I'm quite unconvinced by Facebook in terms of utility.

Naturally, if taken as a dating website I see the potential (even If I could take a shortcut as I've seen that one of my ex is now single, hum.....).

But I'm more interested in it as a semi-professional service to gain followers/audience("qualified", no bots or randoms). I got some good experience with one of my twitter accounts but as I'm not accustomed to the ways of Facebook I don't know where to start effectively as a "personal" page.

Is there any equivalent to the hashtags to instantly join the latest trend and gain visibility to all users? Did you have some good follow-backs on targeted profiles (strangers but with same interests)? The way Facebook displays the "subscription news" thread is unordered by default so is it unnecessary to write stuff spanned over the day to reach different time hours? As it's unordered by default(and I guess most users don't change this parameter), is it even useful to write 10 posts a day or rather aim for one post with bigger "share" potential?

So, if you think you got the knowledge of a Facebook guru share it ;)

Don't like it. It's insipid junk owned by a lovely bunch of fruitcakes. Who are hopefully going to lose four billion dollars soon.

I suppose it depends on the business. Don't see the point in it for what I do, but I'm also in a really tight niche.

if you're looking for users feedback, facebook is a very comfortable option. However, if you want to take advantage of the trending topics and hashtags, keep using twitter.

Like it? Get away from the fuckin thing. I entirely blame social media for the age of short attention span, shallow understanding of the world, easily manipulated brainless fads and world-wide crowd mentality. Your opinion better fit in "thumbs up/thumbs down" terms and 240 characters, and you better have one this instant, no "take your time to research facts" or GTFO. As Terry Pratchett once said, the IQ of a crowd is the IQ of the dumbest people in it divided by the number of people forming the crowd. Well, thanks to Facebook and Twitter and the like we have a permanent crowd of what? tens of millions? Hundreds of millions? The math doesn't look too good on that :P

This reminds me of that other thread we used to have:

"Pounding nails into my genitals: Try to make me like it"

It really depends what you want it for.. I find it great for my business, because it's aiming at local audiences and it's really easy to target them and engage with them on Facebook. Most of our (meagre) advertising budget goes on Facebook ads and it definitely works for us as I'd say at least 70% of our customers learn about us there.
But when I've run online ventures with a larger (national or global) reach I've found Facebook mostly useless as you get very little customer conversion even with paid adds. But I'm no expert and I'm sure I don't utilise it as well as I could do.

There isn't really anything like hashtags. Your page might get recommend to others who have similar interests but there is no real organic discovery, you have to pay for people to find your page or post interesting enough posts that others will like or share them so their friends see them.

Technically, that was for a mob, not a crowd, if I remember correctly. :)

I think it's a bit of an oversimplification to suggest that social media is the only reason for the issues you mention, and I say this as someone who refuses to have a facebook/twitter/etc account. While they undoubtedly have some influence, I'm pretty sure there's deeper underlying causes in our culture - other areas of life also have similar mindless instant gratifications available, and have done since before social media was invented. To give just one of many examples: ready meals/fast food rather than cooking for oneself. The internet is particularly able to offer such things, but that doesn't mean that it's the root cause exactly.

Actually, I would be interested to see a study into whether spending large amounts of time on facebook, twitter, etc does have a correlation with lower attention spans. My gut feeling is that it doesn't - I don't feel that my abstaining has meant I have a better attention span than the people around me, although admittedly that's a sample of size 1, and it might be that my attention span would have been even worse if I hadn't.

Why do you want to have followers on facebook? For political activism or just for fun?
Personally, I think Facebook is vile and Mark Zuckerberg totally evil (and now he seems to have ambitions to become US president...scary), so I've never joined it. But it's still possible to create a fake account? I thought they required an ID or something of the sort. Hmm, maybe I should create a fake account then...I'm tempted to spy on some people I know from real life.

I only use FB to stalk my friends. So no recommendations from me. Except if you want to stalk your friends :P

I was going from memory and from the polish translation, so it's still close enough :P I didn't really mean attention span of individuals, as much as our attention span as a society in general. Things come and go at light speed these days. Every year there are hundreds of things that seemingly captivate everyones attention and disappear to be forgotten almost as fast, some silly memes, challenges and whatevers. Even music stars, book writers etc. are the biggest thing ever for a few months or a year and then are gone. Some scandal or even war makes the news for a couple of days, and is quickly replaced with something new. Can you imagine a nation today following something like Watergate literally for like two years? I certainly can't.

I'm sure you're right that social media aren't the only thing to blame, but I'm damn sure that if not the root of the problem, they at least helped magnify many times over.

I only use it for two things:

Sales or news from the business I follow or to chat with my family and friends.

That all I ever use facebook for.

even gog's community is more friendly than facebook for me! :'(

There are actually at least two dealbreakers for me with respect to Facebook:

1. If you attempt to visit the site with a browser that doesn't at least pretend to be one of the major browsers, you get redirected to the "unsupportedbrowser" page; proper behavior would be for the site to send the content anyway and let the browser interpret it as it is able, but facebook.com doesn't do that. (This issue comes up if, for example, if you try to access facebook with lynx.)

2. The site expects you to use your "real name" (by which they really mean legal name), and if your account gets reported by enough users for having a fake name, you will be locked out of your account until you send them government-issued ID. This makes the site unusable for anyone who goes by a name other than what is technically their legal name.

For these reasons, I do not have an account on the site. (I note that reason 2 is the more serious one, but reason 1 actually is important.)

You will regret your decision of creating a Facebook account.