How To Create An Additional Facebook Profile (And Why You Might Want To)

Despite the growing number of social media apps available for you to try, Facebook is conceivably still one of the most popular and widely used avenues for interacting and keeping up with acquaintances and like-minded people online. It's a handy tool for keeping tabs on not only people you know in real life, but it's also a convenient platform for catching up with current events, entertainment gossip, and everything else that's happening in the world.

That said, keeping your Facebook news feed relevant can be quite the endeavor. Unless you maintain your Facebook account annually and routinely weed through the friends, pages, and groups you follow so that only the ones you care about are still in your network, you can quickly get bogged down by an onslaught of content that may be uninteresting — and sometimes even offensive — to you. When faced with Facebook fatigue, you may find yourself wanting to either create a brand-new account that only a handful of your closest friends and loved ones know about or frequently deactivate your Facebook account to take a much-needed break.

To address problems of digital drain and the inability to keep up with a jampacked news feed, Facebook recently came out with a new feature that could potentially help. Rather than create multiple and separate Facebook accounts for personal, work, and specific interest purposes, you can now set up extra profiles and simply link them to your primary one.

When you first create a Facebook account, you also create your main profile that bears the name you go by in real life. This primary profile is also the one that you'll likely use to communicate privately with those in your friends list via Messenger, manage Facebook pages as an owner or administrator, and share personal updates with those who follow you. If you intend to use Facebook to branch out and find communities for a variety of interests, you don't need to use your main profile if you don't want to clog it up. That's where additional Facebook profiles come in.

Each additional profile — you can create up to four, provided that you have a Facebook account and main profile already in place — will have a unique username as well as its own friends list and news feed. Through these profiles, you'll be able to follow different Facebook groups and pages and add users you make friends with online.

Additional Facebook profiles are essentially under the umbrella of your primary one, so they'll use the same account settings, such as your contact information, login information, connected third-party apps and websites, ad preferences, and other general information about your Facebook account. Meanwhile, you can set up individual profile settings for each additional Facebook profile. This includes the ability to block people's Facebook profiles, adjust who can see your posts, and determine who can tag you, among others. You can also use Messenger as one of your additional Facebook profiles if you ever want the option to. In any case, it's highly recommended that you run through the most important Facebook privacy settings for every additional profile that you create.

To add a new Facebook profile to your account using a computer, do the following:

1. Open a browser tab, go to facebook.com, and log into your main profile.
2. Click your profile photo in the top-right corner of the page.
3. Hit See All Profiles.
4. Tap Create New Profile or Page.
5. Select Personal Profile and hit Next.
6. Click Get Started and follow on-screen instructions.

The steps are similar on a mobile phone:

1. Launch the Facebook app and log into your main profile.
2. Tap your profile photo in the bottom (iOS) or top (Android) navigation bar.
3. Hit Create Facebook Profile. You may need to hit the dropdown arrow next to your current profile to get to it if you already have additional profiles or have pages that you manage.
4. Select Personal Profile and tap Next.
5. Tap Get Started and follow onscreen instructions.

Note that while you can create up to four additional Facebook profiles to your primary one, you can only create one every 72 hours. Once you have an additional Facebook profile in place, you can switch between profiles by hitting your profile photo on the navigation bar to open Facebook's menu and selecting the profile you want using the dropdown arrow next to your name. Your new extra profile will be empty to start with and will have the default Facebook settings assigned to it. You'll have to add friends, follow pages, join groups, and make any modifications to set preferences accordingly.

Having a wide Facebook network sounds good in theory because it lets you keep in touch with as many acquaintances as possible, your news feed can easily get oversaturated. Depending on how active the users you follow are, important updates from certain people you actually want to hear from may get buried and lost in the shuffle.

By being able to create additional Facebook profiles, you can sort of compartmentalize different groups and communities you are part of. People you work with don't need to be bombarded by photos of your baby or pet. You can also freely comment on the pages of public figures you follow without worrying about being trolled by rabid fans or fellow followers. You can keep your primary profile exclusive for actual friends and family and use your additional profiles for outer circle contacts, online friends, and people you share common interests with.

Additional profiles also give you a safer avenue for making new friends on Facebook that you don't necessarily want to interact with those you know in real life. By segregating your Facebook contacts lists, you lessen the likelihood of your Facebook getting hacked and having to go through the painstaking process of securing everything connected to your main account if it does get infiltrated.

The most important perk of having additional profiles is that you get a better handle on Facebook's algorithm and ensure that the posts that you see are relevant to you. As long as you maintain a profile's theme or purpose by only following certain people, pages, and groups, you won't have to mute anyone on Facebook too often to control how often their posts show up on your feed.

In general, your main Facebook profile shouldn't show that you have also created additional personal profiles as well. However, some tech-savvy users may be able to glean from context clues that you have several profiles in the mix and that they are all connected. This is especially easy to do if your profiles have the same friends added — including adding your primary profile as a friend on your additional ones — join the same groups, follow the same pages, interact with the same content, or use the same profile photo.

Users who've added your additional Facebook profile may also find your primary one if you allow people to find the latter using your contact information. To avoid this from happening, you need to adjust your privacy settings and limit who Facebook can suggest your primary account to using your email address or phone number. You may also want to control what appears on each of your Facebook profiles and adjust who can tag you in posts as this can be another way for people to figure out that your profiles are connected.

Lastly, if you've linked your Instagram account to your main Facebook profile via Accounts Center and a Facebook user follows one of your additional Facebook profiles, they may be able to see your primary profile as a suggestion under People You May Know.