Though “family on Facebook” has been the punchline of many a joke in the last few years, there are still several reasons why accepting those friend requests from the members of your family might be a good idea. Here are ten of the things you might want to consider before ignoring that friend request from a relative.
- New Filtering Options – Though Facebook has always implemented filtering tools, they’ve become much simpler to use recently. Separating your family into their own list will allow you to block their access to the status updates or photographs you don’t want them to see.
- Pictures – Having instant access to photographs from a birthday party you weren’t able to attend or a family gathering you had to miss is a great consolation. Also, older relatives with working knowledge of a scanner have been known to upload blast-from-the-past photos that bring smiles to the hardest of faces.
- Event Information – Coordinating family gatherings or reunions for a very large clan can be a bit difficult. Creating an event page and adding everyone to it eliminates much of the headache. Using Facebook to ensure that everyone knows when and where to show up cuts out quite a bit of confusion and reduces the waste of mailed paper invitations.
- Staying in Touch Over Long Distances – As families spread further from one another to embark upon their own lives, social networking sites like Facebook make it easy to stay in touch. A quick message or status update is simple to compose and photographs can be shared with the touch of a mouse.
- Sharing Milestones – The buildup to a wedding ceremony, the birth of a child or other major lifetime milestone is easy to share with relatives across the country or even around the globe with Facebook. With a single status update, you can let everyone in your family know that a new bundle of joy has arrived or you’re officially married.
- Keeping Up With Important News – During times of trouble, Facebook can be one of the easiest and fastest ways to keep yourself abreast of any developments. Serious illnesses or medical problems that require a hospital stay or surgical procedure are just one example of the things that can be difficult to keep everyone in a large family informed about; when everyone has access to a wall post, everyone is in the know.
- Your Hard-Partying College Days Are Behind You – One of the reasons that many young adults balk when they receive that friend request from a relative is that they’re in the middle of sowing their proverbial wild oats. When those days are behind you, it might be a good idea to reconsider a “no family” policy.
- You Have Hard-Partying College-Aged Kids – Keeping up with a busy college student can be difficult, to say the least. Kids who don’t have time for a phone conversation can often squeeze in a Facebook message or two. However, you should remember that one too many scolding comments can land you on a Restricted list.
- Streamlining Use For Older Family Members – It’s no secret that older people sometimes have problems learning new programs and techniques. The intuitive set-up of Facebook is not only easier for them to use, but also streamlines several other sites’ functions. Instead of learning the ins and outs of Flickr, Twitter and your blog, elderly relatives can view pictures and stay up-to-date on your life from one site.
- Post and Comment Approvals – Those embarrassing comments from family members about your habits as a child or stories that you’d rather not see the light of day were, once upon a time, almost unpreventable. Unless you happened to catch a wall post or comment just as it was made, it could sit proudly upon your wall for hours. Recently, Facebook has implemented a feature that allows users to approve tags, comments and posts before they’re published, eliminating the need to hover protectively over your page to prevent humiliation.
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