How To Optimize Facebook With Friends Lists, Part 2
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In the last post, we established Friends Lists so that we can easier navigate our ever growing list of contacts. The new Facebook homepage accommodates this quite well. Just below “News Feed”, you’ll see all the Friends Lists you just created. Click on any one of those, and you’ll only see the parts of the News Feed that pertain to them. Now, let’s take this a step further…
Adjusting Privacy Settings For Your Friends Lists
Once you have your lists, you may want to configure a few privacy settings for those lists. For example, let’s assume you create a list of business contacts. You can then adjust the privacy settings on this list so that none of your business contacts can see the more personal areas of your Facebook profile. You can keep some of your friends at a more distant professional level, while keeping your personal friends in the know. Here’s how:
Let’s do this by example. You can then do the same thing for the other settings in the same area. Okay, so let’s say that you want to create a list of people and call it “Business Contacts”. Let’s also say that you only know them professionally, and you don’t want them to see or interact with your personal friends. Maybe you just want to be sure nobody in your professional life starts messaging people in your personal life. Here’s how you would block your “Business Contacts” list from seeing your personal friends.
First, in the upper right corner, go to Settings and click Privacy Settings.
That will take you to the privacy page. It’s worthwhile looking through all of these, but for our example, click Profile.
This will let you set privacy options for the major elements of your individual profile. You can adjust the privacy settings of each element of your profile, such as “Wall Posts” and “Friends”, so that only certain groups can see it. Continuing our example, scroll down to Friends. Clicking the [?] next to it opens up a detail box to show you what this will adjust.
If you clicked the [?], click Okay to close this note. Then click “My Networks and Friends” to see the rest of the options. These are all very general settings for who is allowed to see your friends. We don’t want to block everyone, only certain groups. So, click Customize.
This will open up an area allowing you to make specific changes.
If you want to manually set it so that everyone can see your friends, click “Everyone on Facebook”. If you want the rest of your friends to only be visible to Friends or even Friends and their Friends, click one of those radio buttons. You can likewise set it so that only certain networks can see your friends. Such as people that went to the same college as you or people that live in the same city. What we’re interested in is this last option. You’ll notice in the above that I’ve selected “Only Friends” are allowed to see my profile. Then it lets me enter an exception. I can enter individual friends’ names, or the name of one or more of my Friends Lists.
So, to prevent Business Contacts from seeing and interacting with the rest of my friends? I chose “Only Friends” are allowed to see who the rest of my friends are as a general privacy choice. In the area beneath, “Except These People”, I would then type the Friends List, Business Contacts. If you have more than one Friends List that you’d like to block, enter the name of another Friends List after that, separating them with a comma between each entry.
You can then do the same for the other privacy settings in your profile. Don’t want your Business Contacts to be able to post to your wall, for any and all to see? No problem, block them. Perhaps a better option: don’t want your Business Contacts to be able to see your wall where your friends may make very personal comments? Adjust your Wall Posts settings the same way we did above.
Conclusion
Thank you for following along with these tutorials. I hope that for many of you, this was an interesting find and a creative way to organize your Facebook to meet your personal and professional needs. I welcome any feedback you may have on these tutorials.
