Lollipop Local

My body building client who performs under his real name wants to be sure that no fans can access his family photos and other info on his personal profile.

Setting up your personal profile to select who can see your personal interactions on Facebook

So, first of all, let’s look at setting up your personal profile to ensure your privacy on Facebook.

Hover your mouse over the Home tab to the top right and you will see the drop down menu that allows you to access your Privacy Settings.

This will allow you to choose who you want to be able to connect with you – Public, Friends, Friends of Friends, etc. It will also allow you to decide who you want to be able access you via your registered email and who can tag you on Timeline and images.

Select the option to make all past posts “friends only” just in case you have a few family posts set as public in the past.

Segmenting friends into lists so you can monitor who sees what

When you add friends, make sure that you put them into a specific list. Are they people that you want to be able to see photos of your children or your private activities? Put those people into Family and/or Close Friends. And then put anyone else into relevant lists that link them all together so you can tailor any personal content that you do want to show to those who are not Family or Close Friends.

You could look to activate Subscriptions so that people can follow your public status updates without having to friend you. However, if you are trying to keep the two entities separate, I would be tempted to leave that switched off and to not accept friend requests from people that you do not know or that you know through the pursuit of your business.

Don’t link your personal profile to your business page under occupation.

Privacy levels on individual status updates and photo uploads

When you add a status update or image, make sure that you select the correct Privacy options from the bottom right of the status update box. However, you should remember that if you comment on someone else’s status updates, your name could appear to people who are not your Friends – depending on the level of privacy selected by the owner of that profile.

So, for example, my settings allow only friends of friends to see the status updates and comments of those who post on my timeline. So that’s the friends of my friends are able to see you. If I had left that set to public, then anyone could see you.

This highlights the need to choose your personal profile image wisely. If you really want to keep your personal and business activities separate, don’t put up an image that draws attention when you comment on other people’s timelines.

Controlling access to your personal details

To control who sees what in terms of the personal information that shows when someone does check on your profile details, if you click on the small blue letters ‘About’ underneath the profile pic and next to your ‘Pictures’ tab. Or the big ‘Update Info’ button

This will reveal a series of boxes that cover
Work and Education
Living
Family
Pages

If you click the Edit button (1 in the image here) you will then see the familiar sharing control globe (2 in the image) and you can alter these to reflect just how much information you want each category of ‘friend’ to be able to see. So whether that’s Public, Friends of Friend, Friends or customise it to one of your lists is up to you.

Facebook Privacy – What can other people see?

Next to the Update Info Button is the Activity Log. Click the arrow and the resulting drop down menu will give you the option to View As. This shows you what your page looks like to a public viewer or subscriber.

The Facebook guidelines are quite helpful.

If you would like to learn more about how to separate your personal Facebook activities from your business promotions, call us on 01702 476517

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Tags: facebook privacy

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 31st, 2012 at 10:30 am and is filed under Facebook, Local Social Media Optimisation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.