You can use your Facebook account for both work and your personal life by utilizing Facebook’s customizable privacy settings. You may not want your sources or coworkers to see the same info and content as your friends and family – here’s how to go about doing that.
Sorting your contacts
The first thing you want to do is group your Facebook contacts into lists – you can have as many as you want and people can go into multiple groups. You may choose to have separate lists for Friends, Family and Work Connections, for instance.
1. Log in to Facebook and click on Account>Friends in the top-right of the blue menu bar.
2. Along the top of this page click on Create New List
3. Name the list (do a “Work” list first)
4. From here, select who you want to put into this list. If you know everyone off the top of your head, you can choose them individually by typing in the first few letters of their name
OR
5. If you’d like to go through all of your friends and select many at a time to add to this group, click Select multiple friends.
6. Click on the friend’s photo to add them to this list.
You can repeat this for more lists if you’d like.
For Friends added after this point: When you click on the Add me as a Friend button on a new friend request, there’s a dropdown menu that appears that allows you to select a group to put that friend into. You can also go back to your Friends page and edit the groups after the fact.
Facebook Privacy Settings
Facebook gets a lot of criticism for how it uses member info, but they actually have a lot of options for customizing your privacy – most people just choose not to take advantage of them. It can be a bit complicated to customize, but it is well worth taking the time to delve into the options.
First, log in to your Facebook account. Click on Account>Privacy Settings in the top right blue menu bar.
Basic Directory Information: On this screen you can set how anyone – including people that aren’t on Facebook – can find your account in the Facebook search and directory.
Sharing on Facebook: Here is where you can really start to customize your privacy settings. Select Custom settings to specify how particular contacts can access your info (I recommend this over the other options).
Privacy Options explained:
- Everyone – Anyone can see this – on or off Faceboo
- Only Friends – Only people who are current friends can see this
- Networks and Friends – Your friends and any networks you are in can see this
- Friends of Friends – Your friends and anyone they are friends with can see this
- Customize – Choose this option to set specific friends or friend groups who can or can’t see the selected item.
If you select Customize, here’s how you can make it so a certain group can’t view the selected part of your profile.
For this example, let’s say you don’t want your work group to see photos tagged of you:
- Select Custom under Photos and videos I’m tagged in
- You can set only certain groups, specific individuals or selected networks to see the selected item.
- Under Hide This From, begin typing the name of specific people or the name of your work list of friends to block those users from seeing Photos and videos you’re tagged in
Preview: At any point you can preview how a particular contact sees your profile by clicking on Preview my Profile on top of this page. Put in a restricted contact’s name to see how your profile looks on their screen.
Editing More Privacy Settings
From the main Privacy Settings Page, on the bottom, there’s an option to edit how Applications, Games and Websites can use and display your info. You can customize things here that can affect how Google and sites that use Facebook tools (like the NYT and Post, for instance) can use your info.
On status updates: Click on the lock under the Status update box to set who can see that particular status.
On your photos/videos/notes: When adding media to your page, you’ll be given the option to specify which friend groups, networks and individual users can and cannot view it.
More:
Intro to Facebook for Journalists
Sharing Your Content on Facebook
© Mandy Jenkins Copyright 2010
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