It finally happened to me last night. The thing 20-somethings dread most.
My mom Facebook friended me.
Do I accept? If I do, she will have a level of insight into my life that I am not sure I’m comfortable with her having. My mom is a worrier, after all. If I don’t accept, her feelings will be hurt. What to do?
Because of the viral, open nature of social media, you usually end up engaging with multiple social circles on the same site. This makes things tricky when you are using your Facebook profile to keep in touch with friends and family members, while at the same time connect with clients and business contacts. You wouldn’t want your boss or a potential client seeing photos of you lounging on a beach in a bathing suit, after all.
Luckily, the fine folks at Facebook have added a multitude of privacy options to the site that allow you to designate who is allowed to see what on your profile page.
Here are a few of my favorites:
1. Friend Lists
Friend lists allow Facebook users to create “groupings of friends based on your personal preferences.” For example, I have three Friend Lists that I funnel most of my Facebook contacts in to: friends, family and business. The best part about Facebook’s Friend Lists function is that you can ascribe specific privacy policies to each list. For example, I can change the privacy settings so that only those on my friends and family lists can see the photos from my vacation in the Bahamas (I wish. Anyone want to actually send me to the Bahamas?)
Friend Lists are a great tool that helps you keep the appropriate persona without having to create separate profiles for business and personal purposes.
2. Photo Tagging.
Let’s get back to the photos from my hypothetical Bahamas vacation. Let’s say, hypothetically, that I called in sick, rather than use vacation days to take my trip to the Bahamas. If my vacation buddy posts picture from the Bahamas to Facebook, and tags me, there is a chance that my boss will see them and I’ll get busted.
Facebook has a privacy setting that will prevent mishaps like this. Just go to Account: Privacy Settings: Profile Information and click on the Photos and Videos of Me setting option. Here you can designate who can see tagged photos and videos of you. You can even get as specific as hiding tagged photos from certain people on your list, like a nosey mother, for example.
3. Wall Posts
Just because you are using Facebook to connect with business contacts, doesn’t mean that your friends and family do too. I’ve had several cousins post something completely inappropriate to my Facebook wall that I’ve immediately had to delete. Luckily, there are a couple of privacy settings that help you manage instances such as these. Again, go to Account: Privacy Settings and Profile Information. On this page, you will see options to control who can see your wall posts, who can comment on posts and even an option to disallow posting completely.
There are a number of other settings that you can fiddle with to limit access to your profile and I highly recommend you click around Facebook’s Privacy Setting menu to see what they are.
As for me, I need to figure out what privacy settings to set for my mother and pray that she doesn’t discover Twitter!