(Blog-Off II Entry) Keeping the personal private using Facebook limited profiles.

I was starting to accept that my Facebook personal life would careen into my business life.  Though I’ve worked hard to keep my personal and business lives separate, my use of “Friends only” in my privacy settings was starting to lose its effectiveness.  I fell into awkward ground this past July when I started to manage corporate Facebook fan pages on behalf of clients. 

To manage a clients’ page, I have to be befriend the administrator on Facebook.  

The reverse holds true as well.  For me to provide administrative rights back to clients for pages I’d set up, I can not do this until we are “friends”.  And though I do truly like all my clients, having instant deep friendship presents its awkward moments. 

As heavy social networker, I definitely use Facebook to hold pieces of my personal life.  I mostly connect with friends and family, and a number former colleagues with whom I share a healthy, personal respect for.  Like many people, Facebook holds my wedding photos, major milestones my children’s lives and really bad high school pictures.  I’ve even used Facebook to reunite my 14 cousins through a group and there within we share all our vintage photos of our mutual grandparents.  

But there is a fix for all this.

There is a little known Facebook feature called a limited profile that can provide greater privacy.

Creating limited profiles and managing them is not intuitive so up till now I’ve added people to my limited profile but have not specified what this limited profile can and can not see.  And worth noting is that if you do not take an extra step to exclude your limited profile from key information, then your ‘limited profile’ friends see just as much as your regular ones.

As my business keeps creeping in on my personal life, and local politicians want to become ‘friends’, I decided to master this feature.

Here are a the steps:

First assign a friend to the limited profile list. 

You can do this one of two ways:

1. When you accept the friendship of someone, you have an option to add them to a list.  There will be a Facebook added list name (or tag) called ‘limited profile’.
2. Alternatively, you can go into your ‘friends’ section and choose ‘limited profile’, a menu pick on the left hand side, and then add friends to this list.

With a list of limited profile chosen people – you then need to identify what this list will NOT see in your Facebook profile.  Remember, the default is that they can see everything your friends see until you specify what they can not see.

Indicate which profile sections are excluded from your limited profile.

In Settings (top right hand corner), choose privacy settings. 

Among your privacy settings, choose “profile”.  Under ‘basic’, you will see a number of sections of your profile. 

Using the pull down menu, choose ‘customize’.    [that was always the menu pick that trumped me .. it was not obvious that I had to customize to specify limited profile]

You will get a little popup box asking who can see this section.  Go to the red “except these people” section and start typing “limited profile”. 

The information you may want to hold dear are:

*  Status and links
*  Some photos tagged of me
*  Some photo albums
*  Videos tagged about me

Note - you can also exclude your limited profile list from contact information section too. Just follow the same logic as above.

And voila!  You now can mix some business with pleasure on Facebook.

Do note:  For those who want to delve deeper into Facebook privacy, I found an excellent blog post about this a while back called 10 privacy settings every Facebook user should know by Nick O’Neill.

Laurie Dillon-Schalk is the Chief Marketing Strategist and founder of Social Wisdom - a Toronto based digital marketing agency that helps firms and individuals use social media and the web wisely.

You can find Laurie on Twitter at twitter.com/Ldillonschalk or on her blog at Socialwisdom.ca

Comments

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[laurie]

Kelly Ann,
I do the same thing with my Tweetdeck columns. I have a special group and then my All followers. I watch both but "promote" to my special group. I expect Twitter lists to change all this.

Re: Ok, apologies to the Facebook newcomers! :) If you have questions, send me a line. I'm here to help.

By George - I'd rather those kindred newcomers just leave a comment here than bypass moi to go email toi. N'est pas?

[Kelly Ann]

Hi Laurie,

I love this post. It's informative and to the point. I'm an active user of the Facebook lists. I actually "tier" who sees what information. So some people I accept their friend requests but then put them on the list that eliminates them from viewing just about everything. This comes in handy when random people send you friend requests simply because you're on someone else's friend list. Once I take a look around their profile (and/or get to know them), I either leave them on the list, "promote" them to the next level of visibility of my profile or leave things open for them to see. Another idea would be the people that you network and/or do business with versus clients/prospects. You don't necessarily want them to see the same things. You can also make exceptions on a case by case basis.

Ok, apologies to the Facebook newcomers! :) If you have questions, send me a line. I'm here to help.

Kelly Ann

[laurie]

Tim -
Thank you - with your kind comment I am sitting taller in my chair. Be sure to check the attached link in the post as well as there are other privacy opportunities in facebook.

Also - if you want to know more about linkedin privacy settings - I have a free download on slideshare from my own profile.

Cheers!
Laurie.

[Tim]

Laurie,

Perfect post. Amazing... I am very new to facebook and was looking for these steps and bam you nail it down with not a hammer but a sledge-hammer :) Great job and I look forward to reading more.

T

[laurie]

Darlene -
Crazy isn't it? but to your defense, I think limited profile is a relatively new feature (maybe only 1 yr old.. I don't know) but certainly not promoted.

I'm guessing both you and Janet have business colleague who want to connect on facebook.

Glad you found some value here!
Laurie.

[laurie]

Janet -
Like you, I get a lot questions about this and I've known about limited profiles but have been a bit lazy as it took a couple tries to figure this out! I'm glad you can pass along the wisdom!
I noticed your follow on Twitter - I look forward to reading your tweets!
Laurie.

[Janet Barclay]

Laurie, this is extremely helpful for me right now, as several clients have recently asked me about the best way to handle business contacts who want to be friends on Facebook.

I think I can learn much from you, so I'm now following you on Twitter.

[Darlene Sabella]

I have been on facebook for two years now and I never knew that this could be done. This is an excellent article, thank you for this wise advise. Darlene