Control Who Sees Your Facebook Content With Precision

Recently I was asked by someone how they could share an image to their Facebook profile but limit the access on who could view it. This individual wasn’t a new Facebook user asking the question either,it was a daily user who had quite a lot of experience using Facebook and was familiar with most of the settings.

Within Facebook you actually have the ability to precisely control who sees which content you share and they have made it relatively easy to do so. After showing this experienced Facebook individual on how to properly limit access to those they determined could view their posted content I figured it may be a good idea to share this information with others who may not know about this valuable feature.

This guide will be broken into two separate parts: List creation and Content sharing and privacy controls.

List Creation

Depending on the amount of Friends you have on Facebook you may find creating the lists of people to be a time consuming chore but a necessary one if you wish to precisely control who you want to view your shared content. Do you really want your boss to see the pics from your Saturday night drinking binge? Chances are you don’t and that is why the creating the lists of people is a critical step. After the initial creation of lists and the adding of friends to lists is completed any friends you make after can then be added to your created lists.

1. After signing in to Facebook click on the Account tab on the right hand side of the screen. You will be presented with a drop down menu that looks like this:
   
   Click on the “Edit Friends” link
2. You will now be in the Friends screen of Facebook. In the mid-left panel of the Facebook friends screen you will see this:
   
   Click on the Friends link. This will take you to a screen where you are presented with a list of all of your Facebook friends.
3. On the right hand side of your friends you will see a drop down arrow labeled “Add To List” that when clicked will look like this:
   
   This is the screen where you will create your new lists that will be used to group your friends into or where you will add your friends into Lists you already have created. As you can see I have Lists created for Family, Friends, Other and Social Media. SMS Subscriptions is a Facebook created group.
4. Since you will probably not have any Lists created place your cursor in the Create new list field and give a name to a new list that you would like this friend to appear in. One point to remember is that Friends can appear in multiple lists.
5. You can now go through your entire Friends list and either create new lists or add friends to existing lists. This is an important step that must be completed if you want to control who sees what you share on Facebook. Something to remember is that Friends can exist in multiple lists. For example you may work with your brother so he could theoretically be placed into a Co-Workers List as well as a Family List.

Content Sharing And Privacy Controls

Now that you have divided your friends into appropriate lists you will now be able to precisely control who is able to see the content you share on Facebook.

1. If you click on the What’s on your mind status update field or click on one of the many Facebook share icons you will see a lock icon and two buttons that look like this:
   
2. Click the lock icon and you will be presented with the following view:
   
   From here you will want to click on the Customize link. This is where we begin to configure our privacy sharing options.
3. A new window will pop up and from here you will click on the field beside where it says “These People:”
   
   Choose the link that is highlighted here called Specific people…
4. After selecting the link Specific people… the pop-up on your screen should look like this:
   
   
   

   In the text field labelled Enter a name or list you can start typing the name of specific friends or Lists that you wish to share this content with. Like the rest of Facebook this field is auto-complete so don’t worry if you can only remember the first letter of a friend or list you wish to share this with. Alternatively from this screen you could choose to hide this content from specific individiuals or lists.

   For example you may wish to share your birthday pictures with friends in your Family List so you would choose that list to share those pictures with. Perhaps you went out for your birthday and had a little to much fun but still want to share your pictures with all your friends except your co-workers. In that example you would choose to enter the List Co-Workers into the Hide this from field.

   A critical point to remember here is that individuals can belong to multiple lists. So you may have a friend on your Co-workers and Family list so that individual could still see the pictures posted to family.

Now that you know the steps it takes to create lists and how to share content with only those you choose you should be able to precisely control who sees what content and avoid some of those embarrassing stories we’ve all heard about.

If you would like to learn even more about Facebook privacy features the fantastic blog All Facebook has an extensive guide on the subject: http://www.allfacebook.com/2009/12/facebook-privacy-new/

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