Local businesses who use Facebook understand they can view who they’re friends with by looking at their ‘friend’ list. The downfall is, if there’s only one huge list of everyone clumped together, it’s harder to navigate and takes longer to sort through to find a particular business or friend when you need to. It also makes it more challenging to distinguish other local businesses from individual friends in your list.

Fortunately, for local businesses that use Facebook, there’s an easier way to sort and find the people in your friends list. Below are some of the lists you can ‘bucket’ friends into, in addition to creating your own custom lists for your Facebook business page:

• Acquaintances
• Close Friends
• Restricted
• Smart List

When deciding who to bucket into what lists, Acquaintances and Close Friends are typically similar. The title basically says it all. Close Friends are those who are close to you or keep in contact with the most, where as Acquaintances would be anyone else you’re friends with and like to maybe check in on every once in a while, or not at all. At the same time, you get to decide what the name of each list means to you.

Create Custom Lists to Target Communications and Leads

Custom Lists is an option allowing you to create as many lists as you want and titling them whatever you’d like. If you want a list to be only businesses, you can name the Custom List “Businesses” and add all the local businesses into the Custom List you created.

Restricted Lists Can Prevent People From Viewing What You Don’t Want Them To.

You can also create Restricted Lists, which are exactly what they sound like. If there’s a business or person you don’t want to visit your Facebook site or see the content you’re posting, such as a boss or rival company, you can add them to this list. They will only see content on your Facebook page only if you tag them in the post.

Smart Lists Bucket Those with Similar Interests.

The Smart List is rather interesting and a nice benefit. Facebook compiles the data you and your friends have most in common, and then those friends are placed in your Smart List. The similar information could be anything such as location, places, similar info or interests, etc. This list is updated automatically by Facebook.

You Can Update a Facebook List at Any Time.

Once you’ve created a list, and you want to make some changes to it, there is an Edit option. It’s rather simple to do and allows you do make changes, such as the title of the list or adding and removing people from lists.

Having lists allows you and your local business to sort clients, customers, friends, and businesses into different categories. You’re able to manage these lists as you see fit so you can target communications when necessary. As you gain new “friends” to your page, you should place them into the category that best suits them at the time of the initial contact. It’s something any local business Facebook user should take advantage of, and it’s easy to do.

Chris Marentis is an expert in the field of local business Internet marketing. With his company, Surefire Social, Chris leverages website development, social media marketing, and search engine optimization to generate leads for local businesses.