Search For Friends By Specific City on Facebook

While this search method still works to find your friends in a city (as well as to search Facebook in many other powerful ways), Facebook has also replaced the ability to search through your friends by "current city." 

I love Facebook. I use it for all kinds of things. But for a long time, my two favorite components of Facebook were:

1) Mutual friends and
2) Searching friends by current city.

The first one was great -- any time you meet a new person, you can head over to Facebook and figure out which friends you already have in common. It made life so interesting.

The second one was a must for traveling. If I was heading from Madison to Milwaukee or Chicago for the weekend, the first thing I would do was head over to Facebook and see which of my friends were living in my destination city.

Then Facebook removed the option. Then they added another way to do it through the My Friends tab. Then they took that one away. Then you could do it by searching for the city and choosing “friends.” Then that one went. [sigh]

I gave up. Facebook clearly didn’t want me to know which of my friends were in Madison and which were in Green Bay. So I went back to mass texts and word-of-mouth, not understanding why this had to be so difficult.

But good news: there’s a new way to search for friends by city on Facebook and it is extremely easy!

When you login to Facebook, at the very top of the page, you will see a search bar.

It’s where you search for friends, pages you like, cities, apps and anything else you want to find within Facebook.

The thing most people don’t realize though is that this search bar functions more like a real search tool than they realize. If you type in a person, a city or a page, it will show you that person, that city or that page. But you actually can make your searches significantly more detailed.

If you type in “my friends in Madison” [insert the name of any city], it will simply give you a list of your friends in Madison, WI.

If you type in “ice cream places in Madison” it will list all of the ice cream shops in Madison.

And so on.

It’s worth noting that once you have entered in your search, Facebook will show you results based on what they consider to be “top” finds for you. So that might mean they will only show you ice cream shops in Madison whose page you like on Facebook. Or they might show you posts from your friends who have written about ice cream shops in Madison. (Bear in mind this will not change existing privacy filters. You still won’t see any content from people who haven’t made their content available to you.)

But look at the tool bar at top and you will notice that you have numerous options for how to search.

Poke around in there and see what else you find. If you just want a list of pages for ice cream shops in Madison, click on “Pages.” If you want to see the most recent posts, click on “Latest.” “People” probably won’t get you far for this search, but when you are looking for which of your friends live in a particular city, this will be the tab for you.

Hope this was helpful. Have any other questions about social media you’d like to have explained? Leave a comment or write to me on Facebook or Twitter. I’ll do my best to answer your pressing social media questions.

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