Top 7 Ways How to Use Facebook to Find People

You might have heard that Facebook no longer lets you search for people by phone numbers. Fortunately, there were always a lot more ways how to use Facebook to find people, and we talk about seven of them in this article.

To find people on Facebook, you need a Facebook account and either a computer or mobile device with access to the internet. If you don’t have a Facebook account, this is how you can create one:

1. Go to https://www.facebook.com.
2. Enter your name, email or mobile phone number, password, date of birth, and gender.
3. Click the “Create an Account” button.
4. Confirm your email or mobile phone number.
5. Enjoy your new Facebook account. 

Keep in mind that it’s against the Facebook Community Standards to maintain more than one personal account. If you would like to use Facebook to represent business, organization, brand, or product, you can create a Page.

1. Use the Find People Feature

The most straightforward way how to find people on Facebook is to use the Find Friends button.

1. Go to https://www.facebook.com.
2. Log in.
3. Go to the Friends tab. Click the “Find Friends” button located in the top-right corner of the page.
4. A list of suggested friends will appear, and you can click the “Add Friend” next to each suggestion to add that person as your friend.
   • It’s also possible to narrow down the suggestions using various filters. For example, you can tell Facebook only to display people who live near you.

2. Search for a Specific Person

If you’re looking for a specific person, the search bar is your friend. As we’ve already explained, it’s no longer possible to find other Facebook users by searching for their phone number. Facebook decided to scrap this feature as part of its efforts to improve how it handles sensitive user data.

1. Go to https://www.facebook.com.
2. Log in.
3. Select the search bar, type in any name you want, and either click the search icon next to the search bar or hit Enter on your keyboard.
4. Review the search results and add the person you’re looking for using the “Add Friend” button.
   • Again, you can narrow down the search results using various filters.

3. Look at Your Friends’ Friends

Let’s say you’ve met someone at a recent party, but you don’t know the person’s name, telephone number, or even email address. What you do know is that the person is your friends’ friend, and that’s all you really need.

1. Go to https://www.facebook.com.
2. Log in.
3. Open your Facebook profile page.
4. Click the “Friends” button located in the top menu.
5. Select the friend whose name you know.
6. Click the “Friends” button again to see your friend’s friends.
   • Depending on your friend’s privacy settings, you may be able to see only your mutual friends.

4. Use the “People You May Know” Suggestion Box

Facebook wants you to connect with as many people as possible because it knows that more connections lead to greater engagement on the site. That’s why Facebook occasionally suggests potential friends from your wider circle of friends in the “People You May Know” suggestion box on your timeline.

All you need to do is click the “Add Friend” button below a suggested friend to add that person as your friend.

5. Use the “Find Classmates” Feature

When Mark Zuckerberg, along with several of his fellow Harvard College students and roommates, launched Facebook in 2004, the purpose of the site was to help Harvard students find their classmates. Facebook later expanded to include other universities and education institutions, before eventually changing its trajectory and becoming the social media websites it is today.

Even though Facebook is no longer just for students, the site still supports the original functionality, allowing you to find classmates with just a few steps:

1. Go to https://www.facebook.com.
2. Log in.
3. Type “people who went to [the name of your school] into the search bar.
4. Click the search icon or press Enter on your keyboard.
5. Facebook will display everyone who has their schools listed on their Timelines Public.
6. You can use the “Add Friend” button to initiate a friend request.

6. Search on Google to Find Facebook Users

Facebook’s search feature doesn’t exactly make it easy to find people with very names, such as Sara, Ali, Smith, Novak, McDonald, Muhammed, Chan, or Nguyen. Instead of wasting minutes or even hours endlessly scrolling through a long list of names, you might find it quicker to use Google instead.

1. Go to https://www.google.com/.
2. Type in “site:facebook.com/someusername/” (without the quotation marks).
3. Press the “Google search” button.

Don’t expect all Facebook profiles and posts to show up. It all depends on the person’s privacy settings and on the time of publication.

7. Find Facebook Users with Only a Picture

If you have nothing but a picture of someone and you would like to find the person’s Facebook profile, there are several ways how you can approach this task.

Facebook pictures are stored in galleries, and the actual URL of each individual picture contains a number that uniquely identifies the profile of the user who posted the picture. 

To find this number:

1. Open the picture in your web browser of choice.
2. Right-click the picture and select “Inspect” or “Properties” or something similar.
3. Locate the “Address: (URL)” section and write down the second to last number.
4. Paste the following URL into your web browser but don’t press Enter: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=ProfileID
5. Replace the “ProfileID” part of the URL with the number of the picture.
6. Press Enter.

Alternatively, you can use a reverse image search engine like TinEye to check whether the picture you have appears somewhere on the web.

1. Go to https://www.tineye.com/.
2. Click the arrow icon on the left of the search bar.
3. Look at the search results.
   • Keep in mind that TinEye is unable to identify people or objects in a picture because it looks at the actual pixels.