How To Keep Your Facebook Wall Posts (& Info) Private

Ever want to only update your friends with a wall post?  Would you like to exclude our boss from seeing your status?  Well this guide will show you how to pull this off so your co-workers won’t know you are a party animal and you’re ex-girlfriend won’t see that you are still heartbroken :).

Here are some possible reasons to use privacy on your posts:

• Keep your work & industry related posts from your friends.
• Block specific users (or lists of users) from ever seeing a post.  This can be great when looking to block competitive companies or workers from seeing your posts.
• Deliver more targeted messaging to your segmented groups of friends.  You could write a social media oriented wall post and send to a social media list, and dial the copy down when just posting to a general internet marketing list.  Having targeted posts can help boost click-throughs by increasing relevancy.
• Block personal posts (and content) from co-workers and other colleagues in your industry

How to Apply Privacy To Your Wall Posts

The key to targeting your wall posts/information is to segment your friends list.  By creating detailed lists of your friends, you will have the ability to block specific lists, or show posts to specific people.  Here’s how:

Click on the “Friends” link in the left column:

Next, you want to create a list.  This list will be how exactly you will segment your friends (and display information).

Making them relevant (high school friends, college friends, co-workers, etc) will help you target your messaging.  My personal lists are:

• Friends
• Not Really Friends (you know those people that add you but you haven’t talked to in 10 years)
• Industry

This is what a sample list would look like when completed:

Now that you have your lists set up, you can start segmenting your wall posts away!  Let’s look at an example of a wall post for an update that I might want some people in my industry(and my bosses) to see:

Now that I have the blog post typed up, I would click on the “Customize” button.  This would then take me to the following screen where I can choose who can and cannot see the post:

With this update, none of my friends will see the message … only the people that are on my “Industry” list will see this.

Now, if I wanted to show my friends what I am realllyy doing (while blocking from people in my industry,) I would do the following:

I blocked all of my “not really friends” along with “industry” as well as my boss “Chris Winfield” (he is listed as a friend, not an Industry person) so only my real friends can see what it is that I am doing.

So that is how you can make wall posts that are custom tailored to your audience!

Here are a few key tips to remember:

• Make your lists segmented how you would like to deliver your posts (work, recreation, school, etc)
• You can also block (or add) specific people to a post
• Be careful with your default settings – if you accidentally set this, you could exclude a section of friends from seeing any updates

How to Apply These Settings To Other Facebook Info

Now, while we are on the subject, lets talk about how to block other information from specific people – again, those targeted lists will be a huge help!

Firstly, click on the “Privacy Settings” link underneath the “Account” dropdown in the upper right:

Next, you need to select what you would like to restrict the privacy of.  For this exercise, we will restrict the privacy of a photo gallery, so we would click on “Profile Information”:

Now, the next thing to do is to select which section should be changed.  Figure out what you would like to change, then click on the customize button:

I ended up choosing “Photo Albums” section and was able to customize the privacy on an album-by-album basis.  Just like wall posts, you can customize specific elements by lists and/or by person.  Do do this, you just need to show the section to “Some Friends.”  Then you can choose which friends will see it based on the list or profile of that person.  Here is an example of what I might choose for one of my albums:

This would show the specific album to anyone that I have listed (because I selected all of my lists) but will not show the album to anyone who I haven’t added to a list yet.  This can be done with all of your personal information (age, interests, videos, etc) so organize yourself today to make sure that the wrong people are seeing your private information.

Setting up these lists and privacy settings is simple, and can save you a good deal of grief if you are a Facebook fanatic.  So create segmented lists and ensure you deliver specific messages & information to the correct people!