When it was my birthday, lots of people wished me a happy birthday on Facebook. Very nice. How can I do the same, quickly and easily?
Well, the obvious answer is “post a birthday wish on their wall” but the bigger question is really how do you know when it’s someone’s birthday on Facebook. Turns out we Facebook users are happy to give the site a lot of information about ourselves, including our birthdays. That makes it easy for Facebook to have a birthday calendar and that’s exactly what it does for both mobile and desktop users.
Not only that, it’ll typically tell you whose birthdays are on any given day, making it really easy for you to pick out key friends and family and wish them a special happy birthday, even if there are other friends where you aren’t that close and don’t choose to spend the time to wish ’em anything much at all. It’s okay, your secret’s safe with me!
With thousands of friends on Facebook, there’s not a day of the year where someone’s not celebrating their birthday, so it’s common every morning for me to see something like this:
Apparently today’s the day for Daniel and 7 other friends of mine. Now the easy way to wish them a happy birthday is to simply click or tap on the notification, which takes you directly to the wish-people-happy-birthday page, but if you don’t want to do that or don’t see the notifications, go to Events > Birthdays instead.
Either way, you’ll end up looking at this:
Notice here that Daniel and Wade allow people to post to their walls (Facebook personal pages), while T. Pietro has their Facebook profile set up to prevent that. In the case of the first two, you can type in the box and press Return or Enter to post it, while wishing happy birthday to T. Pietro is a bit more tricky and might involve email or instant messaging.
Type in your birthday wishes, press Enter / Return, and it’ll confirm it was posted:
Do that for each person on your list – elapsed time 30 seconds? – and you’re done for the day. Well done, and well wished!
Tip: We have tons of Facebook help here on the site and you are also invited to follow Ask Dave Taylor on Facebook too.