Myspace and Facebook are perhaps the most important networking sites right now. I'll guide you through some Facebook choices, so you can make the most of it. Mainly for entertainers and others who need to promote themselves or a business.

Start by creating an account, either under your own name or a boring alias - I'll tell you why later.

As an actor or similar, you have two choices. Either interact with your fans and friends via a profile or a page.

Profile

The maximum number of friends you can have is 5000. You will see their status updates on your "home" page - it's called a feed. You can choose to hide some friends, but unless you do that, you see everything. They can send you cards and gifts and other applications. If you encourage them in doing that, your profile page will soon fill up with junk, and it will bury anything you post. However, you will get notifications about everything posted on your page, so if you manage to wade through those, it's easy to keep track. Currently, if you set your wall and posts to be visible for all Facebook users, even those who friend requested you that you haven't approved, will see your posts in their feeds, but can't interact with them.

Page

Pages are meant to be official. If the page isn't official, create a group instead. There are no limits to how many fans you can have. You won't see their status updates in your feed, and they can't e-mail you. Everything you post on that page, will have the profile picture of the page, and your real account is completely hidden from view. They can not send cards, applications or stuff like that - which means you don't have to hurt their feelings by removing those. But you can not send mail from that page, so if they miss your status updates, that's it. You won't get notifications of anything posted, and there are nooks and crannies where stuff can go unnoticed for a long time. You can however ban people from your page if they post something bad (it's a choice visible under the "Report" link). You can not chat "as" your page, only as your profile, and only with friends.

More than one admin:

It's possible to add more than one admin to a page. The profile that created the page cannot be removed by any subsequent admin, but they can remove each other. You should always have an additional profile as admin to a page, for security reasons, whether it's a trusted person or an alternate profile for yourself. If more than one person participates in posting, you should have a policy for indicating who's posting. Also, I've found that different people have different sensibilities, and one person might remove what another might think is harmless - this can and will cause conflicts. Discuss that and other issues, like style and limits, beforehand.

Exceptions to being invisible on a page:

If one of your fans upload a picture to your page and you comment on it - in the past the comment would come from your own profile, but that's been changed. Right now it looks like they've plugged most of those holes. But you'll want to look at the profile icon next to the open space to comment in. If the icon is that of your own profile, the posted comment will be too. If it's that of the page, probably the comment will be posted "by" the page too. Ooops! March 16, I tagged someone on the NativeCelebs, and when I checked the celeb's page, it appared as tagged by me, not by the NativeCelebs page! Glitch? Bottom line, occasionally you're not invisible.

Groups

Creating a group is an option if you would rather have the option of sending the members e-mails rather than having your posts show up on their feeds. The mails and anything you post on that page will be sent from your profile, which will be visible. Groups are supposed to be for non-official communities, although some are official (mostly because the administrators didn't know about pages at the time). What you post on a group will be visible on your friends' feeds only under some circumstances (more on that when I've tested it out).

Security

I regularly get blocked for suspicious activity, because I warn people when someone's profile has been compromised. Normally facebook blocks me, and ignores the one that's been compromised (shrugs). Last time my profile got blocked by Facebook for suspicious activity (end of December 2009, this time because I tried mailing URLs that contained the link the hackers were sending out, although these were WARNINGS about that website, not the website itself), I had to correctly recognize tagged pictures of my friends. I know many celebrities have lots of "friends" they don't know, so this method could be a problem. You should at the very least have another profile as a friend that you can use to reconstruct your friends list, if needed - if the profile isn't deleted outright for some infraction, it'll stay online even if it's temporarily blocked and you can't get in. Or another profile as an admin of any group or page you create.

Why listen to me?

I've spent time testing out pages, much like other people put a speedy car through its paces. Hopefully I've found the pertinent facts for actors, filmmakers and other admins who need to promote an official presence on Facebook.

Annie