How To Set Up a Facebook Account

Setting up a Facebook account is a fairly easy and painless process. You will need an email address to sign up and you’ll need access to that email account to click on the confirmation link.

A couple of things to keep in mind:

• According to Facebook’s Terms of Service, you are only allowed to have one account with them. This same account will include your personal profile and then you can create as many Facebook Groups or Facebook Fan Pages as you want within this account. If you create more than one account and Facebook discovers you have more than one account, they will shut down both accounts and all accompanying Fan Pages or Groups. This means you could potentially lose everything you built and not get it back.

• It is recommend that you use your real date of birth or at least write down somewhere safe what date of birth you use to sign up with. Sometimes if you are signing in from an IP address different from your usual IP, then Facebook will ask you for your date of birth as confirmation that it is really you signing in. Also, they want to be sure you are over the age of 13.

Once you’ve filled out the sign up info, then next page will ask you for your email password. I highly recommend skipping this step for now. You can do this by clicking on “Skip This Step” at the bottom (highlighted in yellow.) By entering your password, Facebook will be able to go in and access your email account to see if anyone in your address book is also on Facebook (or at least those that have used the email address in your address list to sign up for Facebook.) This isn’t always a helpful step which we cover in another post.

Step 2 will ask you for some profile information including the high school and college you attended and your class year. It also asks for your Company Information. Filling these sections out will help Facebook locate people you might know and who you might want to “friend” on Facebook. If you plan on not having a very public profile (perhaps if you are only setting up an account to create business Fan Pages) and do not want to easily be found by others, then I recommend skipping this step. You will find a “Skip” link to do this right next to the “Save and Continue” button.

The last step will ask you upload a profile picture or to take a photo with your webcam. You can do this step now or you can skip it and upload a photo later.

Click on “Save & Continue” and you’re done! Once you are in, Facebook will provide you with additional options for further setting up your profile.  There will also be a reminder that you need to confirm your account by clicking on the link they sent to your email address.

Our next post will cover some additional basics that you’ll want to set for your profile including understanding your privacy settings.

Tags: Facebook, Facebook Fan Page, Featured, Set up account

Category: Facebook How-To