Facebook has been really taking off lately, and once you get familiar with it, you’ll see why. I’ve converted a ton of my friends from Myspace to Facebook, and I hear the same thing everytime, “I don’t get it.”

This is Facebook 101. We’re going to break down parts of Facebook, and share them with you in bite-sized pieces so hopefully, you’ll “get it.”

Today’s 101 is finding friends. As far as I’m concerned, this is the key to having an enjoyable experience on Facebook, and one that will make you keep coming back for more. We’re providing a very detailed explanation of how to find your old school buddies, co-workers, long-lost friends, or just your everyday friends.

Getting Started

After you sign into Facebook, you’ll see “Friends” at the top of the screen. If you hold your mouse over (don’t click) the word Friends, a drop-down menu will appear (shown below). Click on “Find Friends,” and you’ll be on your way to….well, finding friends.

Searching Your Email

This is possibly the best way to find friends you stay in contact with. Most of the popular email services are supported, and all you have to do is enter your sign-in info for that email account.

Facebook will load a new page with all the people that are already on Facebook that you’ve emailed from that account. This could be people you email regularly, or someone you may have only emailed once. Needless to say, not everyone that shows on the list will be someone you want to add - unless you’re a social media whore (which is fine by us) - so take some time and try to figure out who they all are, and add the ones you’d like to interact with.

You’re also able to import a contacts file that you can export from Apple’s Address Book or MS Exchange. Instead of entering your email info, look for the text that says, “Upload Contact File” on the right.

Facebook Suggests

If you’re new to Facebook, this might be empty, but if you already have a few contacts, you should be able to use this section. This can be found in the middle of the “Find Your Friends” page (shown below).

I’m always surprised by the accuracy of this feature. Basically, Facebook looks at your friends, and finds friends they have in common, and it recommends them to you. The only place this falls apart is if you have people that you don’t know follow you from a business or website - like Vivid!. Then it starts recommending people based on those people, and it tends to screw everything up…but for the most part, this is a great way to find friends you may have otherwise missed.

Classmates and IM Buddies

There’s nothing better than finding people you didn’t like in high school, and pretending to be their friend now. Actually, finding my old classmates has made Facebook a blast. At the bottom of the “Find Your Friends” page, you will see the classmates and IM search.

This only works if you’ve entered your school information in your profile, so make sure you get that done. Finding classmates is a piece of cake, but probably one of the most overlooked searches on Facebook. When I’m coaching new Facebook users, this is usually the point where they get a huge smile on their face, and want to forget about the rest of the coaching so they can search for their friends. Let’s not do that. To find your classmates, just click on one of the schools listed, and it will take you to a page with students from your graduating class.

So here’s the really cool part. After you look through the students in your graduating class, you may want to search for friends in a grade above or below yours. Couldn’t be simpler. At the top of the classmates result page, you’ll see the graduation year drop-down box (see below). Just click the drop-box, and you can change the year to see a whole new set of classmates.

Now, let’s say you had friends go to another school, and you’d like to find them. I switched schools the middle of my 8th grade year, so all the kids I grew up with went to a different high school than I did. On the right side of the classmates result page, near the top, you’ll see, “More Search Options” (see below).

Clicking on this will bring you to another search screen with a broad range of options (see below).

On this page, you’ll be able to change schools and search classmates from that school. Yeah, you can also search by company and name, but we’ll talk about that later.

This should be enough to get you started finding friends. We’ll be adding part 2 to this series very soon, so check back to find more ways to find your friends.