Privacy Lists on Facebook

For the last three weeks I’ve been attending the Social Media Success Summit and learning lots of new tips and tricks.

The fabulous Mari Smith, the Queen of Facebook told us 500 million active users have logged on to Facebook during the last 30 days and 250 million log on every day for an average of 55 minutes. Just one good reason why a business owner would want to be on Facebook.

Also learned from Mari that you can accept strangers as friends on your personal Facebook profile and still maintain some level of privacy. You can let all friend requests in but limit their view of your profile. I knew this but I did not know you could create a list of people to limit. The way this works is instead of individually entering each person you want to limit access to in to your privacy settings you can just add the whole list under your privacy settings. All you have to do is create the list and add every person to the list that you want to have limited access to your profile and then add that list under your privacy settings.

You might be saying why don’t I just ignore the friend request? Well, you can but what if that friend request is from your mom, your boss or your neighbor and you really don’t want to offend them?

You have choices:

1. You can ignore their friend request and deal with the “why’d you ignore my friend request on Facebook?” questions
2. You can stop posting updates you wouldn’t want them to read (good idea but most people don’t do this)
3. You can allow them in as your friend but limit the amount they will see on your profile

Here’s how:

First you need to make a list.

• To make a list click on the Friends link (located on the home page, on the left, under your profile picture)
• Click +Create a List button (located to the right above your list of friends)
• When the box pops up: enter a name for your list and start typing in the names of your “friends” that you want to add to your list
• After you select some friends for this list click on the blue Create List button

You now have a list!

If you want this list to be given special privacy settings you need to do the following:

• Click on Account drop down menu (located at the top right of your Facebook profile page)
• Click on Privacy Settings
• Click on Personal Information & Posts
• Click on Posts by Me, Photo Albums (whatever you want to keep private)
• Click on the drop down menu to the right of the setting you want to edit where it says Everyone, Friends of Friends, Only Friends, or Customize. Click Customize.
• Then start typing the name of your list. My list is called Not Sure which means I’m not sure if I want to let this person in to my full profile yet. After I get to know them a little bit I might take them off the Not Sure list and give them more access.

• ← Marin Twitter Tribe at Pacific Catch
• I can do anything! →