Social Media & People
This very morning I spoke to a woman who had recently used Facebook to trace her brother, she had never met him but she found someone on Facebook who she felt looked like a good match and she sent him a message, her hunch paid off and they are now back in touch. Facebook should be one the first place you look for your long lost family member, regardless of the amount of information you have. You should also make sure you are not presumptuous and think that they wouldn’t be on there, you’ve lost touch and people change so don’t assume that in the time that has passed since you saw them that they haven’t joined Facebook or got married or moved to another area of the country, keep an open mind on this one. Did You Know – There are over 2.6 million Facebook users in the UK over the age of 60! Finding people on Facebook is a very straightforward process; it is something you should try if you want to reconnect with people from you past. Facebook has recently surpassed 500 million worldwide users, which is incredible. its means that if Facebook was a country and its users were the population it would be the third biggest country in the whole world behind China and India. Amazingly, there are over 30 million Facebook users in the UK alone, that’s almost half the population! Facebook is the most popular website in the world earlier in the year Facebook over took Google in terms of daily searches performed by people, which is an amazing statistic. So what is Facebook? Facebook is a social networking site that allows people to share information about themselves with people they chose to. You can upload comments photographs and much more, it is a fun and excellent way to keep in touch with people you know and trust it is a community of people and you build your own community as your information is only shared with people you chose to share it with so not everyone can see your personal information. It is a fantastic way to keep in touch with people but also to reconnect with people you have lost touch with. Once you join you can search for people by their location or their school, once you have found them and you have ‘friends requested them’ (done with one click of a button) then you can see their friends and friend request them, before you know it you will spend half your life chatting with people all over the place. If you are on Facebook, finding people is easy; here is how you can do it. First, in order to see the full results of your search, you will need to sign up for Facebook. If you are already a member, go ahead and login. If you are not do not worry, it is easy to do and completely free. Once you have become a member, which will only take a few minutes you can login in.
1. Go to the find your friends on Facebook page. You have a number of options here: find people you know by email, find people you know by last name, find people on your IM (instant messenger) list, browse for people alphabetically (this is somewhat tedious due to the amount of people on Facebook) or browse Facebook pages by name.
2. Use your Facebook friends as a resource. Click on their Friends and choose the option to scroll through their list of friends. This is a great way to find someone in common that you might have forgotten about. It is widely used by people to reconnect with people.
3. Use the Facebook Suggestions link (found to the right of your news stream) as a starting point. You will not only see potential friends and fan pages here, but if you scroll down a little, you will also see an opportunity to search within your groups: college, high school, workplace, camps, etc. What can you do in the event that the person you are looking for is not on Facebook? Luckily, you can do many things.
Facebook is the number one recommendation for anyone who is looking for people they have lost touch with. There are other social media websites that you can use to find people you have lost touch with no are as effective as Facebook as this is such a large volume of people but we, as a tracing company have had limited success-locating people using the following social media sites
This is like Facebook but it is for business people so if the person you lost touch with was a ‘Corporate person’ or had their own business then you could find them on LinkedIn, it is easy and free to create an account even if you are not a business person yourself, once you are on Linking in you can contact people via their profile and be back in touch in no time.
You might have heard about Twitter, we would not recommend using Twitter to locate people you have lost touch with. It is more of a place to go to read gossip and find out latest news as it happens around the world. It is also great for keeping up with the football scores if you find yourself in a Shopping Centre on a Saturday afternoon! Therefore, whilst Twitter comes with a wholehearted recommendation it would not be for its people finder abilities.
Friends Reunited
This site used to be the place to go if you had a person you wanted to get in touch with but almost everyone who used it is now on Facebook. It is a simple system and its one that is still worth trying, what you will most probably find is that the person you’re looking for is on the website but hasn’t logged on for a long time so is unlikely to see your efforts to contact them through the Friends Reunited website. If you are interested in creating an account, it is free to do so. Once you have an account you simply use the search facility to find your school and then add the year you left and it will bring most of the people you went to school with, this used to be a fantastic way to find old friends but alas it is now unlikely to be worth your time.
We live in a technology driven world but also the world of celebrity, combine these two, and believe it or not you end up with an improved chance of finding that old friend or relative. Let me explain this and our first method of online people location in one word..... Google!
Google is a big American search engine. Most people have used Google at some stage and recognise the simple home page layout, white background with a logo and search box. Here is how to find people online using Google.
Firstly, if the person is in the UK, search “pages from the UK” this is an option under the search box, this will keep the information relevant. Secondly, Type the person’s name in quotation marks “their name” this will make Google search for the name in that order and not reverse the name or split the name. The list of results will usually be huge but the most relevant ones should be at the top, what you are looking for is a story with your friends name in it, maybe they got a promotion at work and their company put it in their online newsletter, hey presto you just got your friends work details.
Maybe they play in or manage the local football team again; you can contact them through this. You are unlikely to get a friend with their own website listing all their contact details, what you are looking for is a mention of your friend so you can contact them through this, maybe they did some good community work and it was put in the local paper who have a website, that’s the way Google will help.
123 People
Another free people finder search engine is 123people.com. Again, you have a search box and you enter your friends name, this site will give you a list of email addresses, photos, social networking profiles that match the name you entered. From this, you must try to ascertain if the information is relevant as there are many Americans on this site. You may feel it best to narrow down a few social networking profiles and contact them or maybe you take the email addresses and send emails to those asking if they are the correct person. 123people.com is good stepping-stone to locating your friends but can be time consuming because of all the American entry’s it is still recommended though.
Our final free people finder search engine has to be British Telecom’s online direct enquiries service. It is free to use and is good at putting you in touch with people, maybe not directly with your friend but maybe their parents or family member, let me explain.