How to create a profile page on Bebo

A step-by-step guide to creating a profile page on social networking site, Bebo.

1. Go to www.bebo.com. Click on ‘Sign up’ Fill in all required fields- there is a box for age, you can put the age of your organisation. Remember when you are choosing a password to include numbers, letters and symbols. After you have entered your details at some point you will need to verify your email address, you can do this at the start or at the end up to you.
2. You will go to a page where you can enter information on your profile. This is information that other people will see, and includes areas such as interests, your contact details and if you want your profile to be public or private. It will depend on your organization and what you are using social networking for if you want to have your profile on private or not. For example if your aim is to be accessible to as many people as possible then you would want to be public. If this is the case, be wary when filling out your contact details at the bottom of the page as you don’t know who will be looking at them. You may not want to put people’s personal contacts for example. Your social networking site needs to adhere to your organisation’s message, it is important to treat it like any other interface to the world. There are some blank boxes and titles under ‘happiest when’ etc. You can fill them in to your liking. E.g you may want to say ‘what we do’ or ‘community events coming up’. Once you have completed that, click ‘save and continue’. You can also delete sections if you find them irrelevant.
3. Click on “Home” at the top of the page. When you are “home” you will see an option to “explore”, click on that and click on “groups”. Click on register groups. Register your community organisation as a group. At this point it may be a good idea to click “Applications to join must be approved by a moderator”. This will make sure nobody joins your group who you don’t want joining.
4. You are then directed to a page dedicated to finding friends. You need to decide your policy for friends, e.g are you only going to be friends with other organisations similar to yours or are you wanting to reach as many people as possible? There are three options that you can use while choosing friends to add. On your profile below your profile picture there will be a tab called “invite”. This is so that you can invite members to join your group. You can choose by your address book or typing people in by name.
5. Click on profile- you have been given a standard Bebo skin (background), and you will see what your profile looks like. If your page looks too crowded with different module boxes you can rearrange them or make them not visible. To do this go under the space where your profile picture will be and click ‘change modules’. You can rearrange the modules by clicking on them and dragging them. If you don’t want one to be visible put it in the unused’ column. Then click ‘save new order’ - or reset to default.
6. Next thing to do is get a skin to suit your page. To do this click on ”change skin”. Again under where your profile picture will be. Look through the list that comes up or search anything in particular such as ‘flowers’. Once you have found one that you like click on ‘try it on’. If you like the look, at the top left hand side of the page there is a box saying’ do you want to change your skin to this’ click yes or no.
7. By now your profile should be looking pretty good; it is now time to add a photo on your profile picture. Think carefully about what you want. If you want a picture of the whole team, make sure you have everyone’s permission to put that on Bebo, that goes for any picture you post. You could choose to use your organization’s logo or something that symbolizes it (for example if you are a dance organization you may want to take a picture of ballet shoes to put as your profile pic). To upload a picture/photo click on ‘upload profile photo’. You will need to have either the picture or photo saved on your computer, click browse to find the picture you want and once you have click on it then click ‘upload’, this will then upload your picture onto your Bebo page.
8. Click on ‘home’ tab and click on ‘my account’. Here you can make changes such as what notifications you would like to receive by email, change your user name and cancel your account. Click on email preferences then you can make choices. This is where you can make sure you are reviewing comments posted on your wall and whiteboard before they are posted. This function is under preferences and change preferences. This is a good idea because otherwise you have no control over what someone is posting and all can see it, so moderating your comments before they go up is valuable.’
9. To continue editing your profile use ‘my account’ on ‘home tab’ and ‘edit profile’ on the ‘profile tab’.