It's My Facebook I'll Post What I Want

3 Facebook Tricks to Personalize Your Posts

If you want to get fancy with what you share with your Facebook friends, these three tips let you further customize tags, edit links and collaborate with others.

Facebook is all about personalization—from the pictures you post to integration with the websites you visit to the profile information you share.

While Facebook's biggest fete of personalization is yet to roll out publicly—its new profile design called Timeline—the social network is upping the ante in other areas of its site in the meantime.

Here's a look at three ways you can personalize your Facebook posts by tagging pages a new way, editing the information in links you share and collaborating with others on content.

1. How to Edit the Links You Share

Both LinkedIn and Twitter give you the option to edit the headlines of links you share to the social networks, and now Facebook does, too.

To do this, post a link under "Update Status" and wait for the headline and description to appear. Once it does, hover over either part until it's highlighted in yellow, then click.

Next, make any changes you want to the headline or description of the link, then click Post to submit the link along with your changes.

2. How to Further Edit @ Tags

Back in May, Facebook rolled out the option to tag your friends using only their first names. Now, a popular hack making its round on the Web lets you get a bit more fancy in editing the name of a page or person you want to tag. It does require some patience and a few extra steps.

Before you start, you'll need the ID of the Facebook page you want to tag. To get the ID, visit the page and in the address bar, remove the "www" part of the URL and replace it with "graph" so it reads something like this: https://graph.facebook.com/CIOfacebook.

Next, hit Enter and copy the ID number that displays at the top of the new page that loads. The same steps apply if you want to tag a friend. If they haven't claimed their Facebook vanity URL, their ID number will appear as a string of numbers in the address bar when you visit his or her page.

Next, copy the following text into your status update box: @@[0:[theID:0:LinkName]]. Replace "theID" with the ID number you copied from the Facebook page you want to tag and enter the text you want linked to the page in place of "LinkName". Once you click Post, the text will be linked to the page, as seen in the picture above.

[Want more tips, tricks and details on Facebook privacy? Check out CIO.com's Facebook Bible.]

3. How to Co-Author Documents

Last week, in what is likely a nod to social network rival Google+, Facebook upped the ante in its status update character allowance from 5,000 to more than 60,000.

But if you're looking for more ways to capitalize on long-form posting with the added perk of collaboration, Facebook also lets you create shareable documents that multiple people can contribute to and edit.

This feature, which is similar to a wiki, is available in every Facebook Group you belong to. Here's how it works:

To create a document for your group, visit the group's homepage. Below the name of the group you'll see information on the number of members, how many photos have been updated and a small icon for docs. To begin, click that link.

When you're finished entering content into the document, click the "Create Doc" button on the top right. This will save the document and publish it to the group's feed. Group members will also see an edit button that will let them publish changes as well as the option to see revisions by clicking "Recent Changes."

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Kristin Burnham covers consumer technology, social networking and Web 2.0 for CIO.com. Follow Kristin on Twitter @kmburnham. Follow everything from CIO.com on Twitter @CIOonline and on Facebook. Email Kristin at kburnham@cio.com

Kristin Burnham is a reporter and editor covering IT leadership, business technology, and online privacy and security.