3 Facebook Tricks to Personalize Your Posts
If you want to get fancy with what you share with your Facebook friends, these three tips let you further customize tags, edit links and collaborate with others.
CIO — Facebook is all about personalization—from the pictures you post to integration with the websites you visit to the profile information you share.
While Facebook's biggest fete of personalization is yet to roll out publicly—its new profile design called Timeline—the social network is upping the ante in other areas of its site in the meantime.
Here's a look at three ways you can personalize your Facebook posts by tagging pages a new way, editing the information in links you share and collaborating with others on content.
1. How to Edit the Links You Share
Both LinkedIn and Twitter give you the option to edit the headlines of links you share to the social networks, and now Facebook does, too.
To do this, post a link under "Update Status" and wait for the headline and description to appear. Once it does, hover over either part until it's highlighted in yellow, then click.
Next, make any changes you want to the headline or description of the link, then click Post to submit the link along with your changes.
2. How to Further Edit @ Tags
Back in May, Facebook rolled out the option to tag your friends using only their first names. Now, a popular hack making its round on the Web lets you get a bit more fancy in editing the name of a page or person you want to tag. It does require some patience and a few extra steps.
Before you start, you'll need the ID of the Facebook page you want to tag. To get the ID, visit the page and in the address bar, remove the "www" part of the URL and replace it with "graph" so it reads something like this: https://graph.facebook.com/CIOfacebook.
Next, hit Enter and copy the ID number that displays at the top of the new page that loads. The same steps apply if you want to tag a friend. If they haven't claimed their Facebook vanity URL, their ID number will appear as a string of numbers in the address bar when you visit his or her page.
Next, copy the following text into your status update box: @@[0:[theID:0:LinkName]]. Replace "theID" with the ID number you copied from the Facebook page you want to tag and enter the text you want linked to the page in place of "LinkName". Once you click Post, the text will be linked to the page, as seen in the picture above.
[Want more tips, tricks and details on Facebook privacy? Check out CIO.com's Facebook Bible.]
