Facebook Friends
Facebook was designed to connect people. Those connections are Friends. You can have up to 5,000 Facebook friends and you can segment them so that you can control what each group sees on your Timeline. Segmenting means putting them into collections, for example “family”, “personal friends”, “business friends”, “Wednesday Choir” etc. Creating these segments allow you to share certain info only with your selected segment(s) or to exclude selected segments. For example, you can share photos of your children only with “family” and singing tips with “business friends” and “Wednesday Choir”.When you become Friends with someone on Facebook, you automatically “follow” them and they “follow” you. This means you may see each other’s posts in your News Feeds. If you are concerned that this will result in your getting lots of posts that you really don’t want to read, you can “unfollow” someone without “unfriending” them. This means that their posts don’t appear in your news feed – i.e. you don’t have to see what they had for dinner J. They will not know you have unfollowed them.
Followers
Followers are those who see what you post on your Timeline. If they are your FB Friend, they will see what you choose to share with them individually or as a member of one of your segments (see above).People can follow you without being your FB friend, but they will only see what you post publicly on your timeline.
If you’d like to know more, you might be interested in my free guide:
Facebook Profiles, Pages and Groups – what’s the difference and why should Choir Leaders care?