Connecting with others as Facebook Friends has steadily become a normal method of swapping contact information. Because of that, it is also increasingly becoming important to segment your Facebook Friends into smaller groups in order to control the audience of the messages you post.

You might want to segment your message for social or business reasons. If you’re the head of your child’s school’s PTA, for example, your college friends and family who don’t live in your area likely won’t want to see those updates. But since you are Facebook Friends with a bunch of PTA members and parents of kids who attend the same school, you definitely still want to use Facebook as a way to disseminate that PTA information.

The same reasoning applies if you own your own business or are Facebook Friends with your co-workers or clients. Photos and information you want to share with your family and close friends are not necessarily appropriate for your business contacts.

So, how do you create lists of your Facebook Friends?

From your “Home” view on Facebook, look along your left side bar. You’ll likely see your Favorites list, then Pages (if you admin any Facebook fan pages), then Groups if you are a member of any Facebook groups, and then a Friends section.

Facebook gives you a couple sample lists by default. I have a Family list and Close Friends list as standard Friend List options on my profile.

If you hover the cursor, you’ll see a “More” link that appears.

After clicking on the “More” link, your page with refresh and you’ll see your existing Lists, plus the option to Create a New List and to See All Friends.

If you choose “Create a List“, a box will appear allowing you to name that list and begin to add your current Facebook Friends to it. If you begin typing the name of your Friends, Facebook will auto-populate suggestions for you.

Once you have created a list, you can easily edit it. When viewing that list, you’ll see a box on the right hand side. You can view all the people in that list and also add new people to it.

The next step is to know how to post an update to one of your Facebook Friends Lists.

How to post a status update to one of your Friends Lists

You have 2 options.

1. Adjust the audience of the status update you are going to post from your Home view.

2. Visit your specific Friend Lists from your left side bar and then post your status update there.

Although the ability to place your Facebook Friends into smaller groups in order to segment your message has been available for some time, there are still many users who are unaware that this functionality exists (even if they use this type of segmenting with lists or circles on other social media platforms).

Controlling who of your Facebook Friends is shown each update can help you avoid awkward or potentially detrimental situations.

Do you use Facebook Friends Lists? If so, how many lists do you have?