19. Using Social Media to Find Old Friends

The primary reason most people use social media is to keep in touch with family and friends. I’ve found Facebook and other social networks to be great places to get back in touch with people I haven’t seen in years. I’ve become newfound “friends” with people I used to work with, old high school buddies, even the next-door neighbor kids I used to play with when I was in grade school. I would have no idea what these people were up to if it wasn’t for social media.

How can you use social media to reconnect with old friends, schoolmates, and colleagues? It can be a bit of a detective job at times, but there are techniques you can use to find people you haven’t heard from in years. Read on to learn more.

Facebook offers various ways to find people on its site, which we’ll discuss later in this chapter. You can search for people by where they live, their hometown, where they went to school, where they used to work, and more. You can also search by first or last name, of course, as well as search for people who are friends of your Facebook friends—and thus are likely to be old friends of yours as well.

That doesn’t mean you’ll always find the people you’re looking for on Facebook. Even with so many users, not everyone in the world is on Facebook. But it’s still the best and first place to look.

And how do you find topic-specific websites and message forums? That’s why we have Google. Just do a search on your topic of choice and then click through the search results until you find an interesting site. Chances are that site will have the message forums you’re looking for.

Other times, however, the person might be on that site but not so easily found. Imagine, for example, that you’re searching for someone named John Brown. A given site’s search results may very well turn up the person you’re looking for, but you’d never know because of the other several thousand John Browns listed. When you’re searching for someone with a common name, it’s easy for that person to hide in plain sight.

For this reason, you might want to fine-tune your search by including other information about that person, as we’ll discuss in the next section. Search for John Brown, but make sure you’re filtering by hometown or high school (or whatever) to narrow your results.

You can also include other information in your search query to generate more focused results. Include the person’s middle name (if you know it) in the query, along with the person’s age or birth date, old email address, names of family members, and so forth. The more precise your query, the more exact the results.

It’s especially difficult to find women you used to know, as names get changed along with marital status over the years. Some women have enough forethought to enter their maiden name as their middle name on Facebook and other social media, so the Sara Jensen you used to know might be listed as Sara Jensen McCready, which means her maiden name actually shows up in a Facebook search. Others, however, don’t do this—and thus are harder to find.

You can, of course, search for a partial name—searching just for “Sara,” for example. What happens next, at least on Facebook, is a little interesting. Facebook returns a list of people named Sara, of course, but puts at the top of this list people who have mutual friends in common with you. That’s a nice touch, as it’s likely that your old friend has already made a connection with another one of your Facebook friends.

Past that point, you can then display everyone on Facebook with a single first name. But that’s going to be a bit unwieldy, unless your friend has a very, very unique name.

When you’re searching for old friends on Facebook, you have the option of filtering your results by a number of key factors, including the following:

• Hometown

• Current city

• High school

• College or university

• Graduate school

• Employer

• Mutual friends

It’s a matter of selecting which of these criteria you’re looking for and then browsing through the results returned by Facebook.

We discussed how to filter your Facebook search results in Chapter 6, “Keeping in Touch with Friends and Family on Facebook.” Revisit that chapter for more details.

It’s easy to do. Just click or tap your friend’s name anywhere on the Facebook site, such as in a status update, to display his Timeline page. Then you want to click or tap Friends under the person’s name to display his Friends page, which lists all of his Facebook friends. When you find a person you’d like to be friends with, click the Add Friend button. That’s it.

Some examples...

• I went to Ben Davis High School in Indianapolis and graduated in 1976. Unfortunately, there’s no group for people who graduated my year, but there is a group called Ben Davis High School Class of 1975. That’s close enough to contain a lot of people I used to know and has been a boon for reconnecting with former classmates.

• There’s another high school–focused group I belong to, titled “Ben Davis: Where Is *and/or* Do You Remember.” This group is focused solely on finding old classmates over a variety of years. It’s a great place for posting questions about people I’ve long lost touch with.

• I belong to several other local groups that have proven useful in finding old friends from my youth. There’s Ben Davis Alumni Unite!, Growing Up on the Indy Westside, Indy West Side, Old Time Indy’s Long Missed Businesses, and more. Some of these groups are more useful than others; some are just fun places to reminisce about days gone by.

I’m sure there are similar groups for your old high school and town. All it takes is a little searching—and then participating in the group to find friends you used to know.