The WMF Archives

By Lindsay Woolman 

For a couple of months I’ve had a couple of business contacts who friended me on Facebook and I had no idea what to do with them. I have personal photos of myself on Facebook and even though I want clients to think of me as a real person, I don’t really think they need to see me disco dancing at a party.

So, what is a freelancer to do? Well, Facebook loves to change their privacy settings and is constantly updating things, so it can be confusing to keep up, but one of the things you can do it adjust your privacy settings and create a list of business contacts. This tip was so huge for me that once I learned it, I friended everyone who’d been waiting in my queue and relaxed a little. I no longer had anxiety about what was written my wall or the photos I only wanted shared among friends. Here’s what you can do:

Create a Friend List:

1.  To create a list log on to the Home page of Facebook and click on the tab at the left that says “Friends.” 
2. Another page will pop up and at the top right side you’ll see a button that says, “Create a List.”  
3. You can create a name for your list (i.e., Business) by typing in the name of the contact, clicking on it (this will highlight it in blue) and they clicking the “Selected” box. I had to play with this a little before it made sense.

Manage Your Privacy

Once you’ve got your business list, you can do all kinds of things with it. You can go into your privacy settings and hide your photos, status updates, religion, or whatever you want from business contacts.

To do this go to your Privacy Setting, then click on Profile. For any of the list of options you can “Customize,” and choose to “Hide this from” certain names or a complete list. You can also see how any contacts view your profile.

Organized Status Updates

The Friend List is also incredibly helpful for viewing the status updates of your business contacts in a more organized way. You can go again to your Home page and click on the Friends tab on the left to edit your list and see status updates just from those contacts on the list.

I really don’t know why Facebook doesn’t make this process easier or promotes it more. I had to do quite a bit of searching to figure it out myself. I think it’s still good to use caution and filter how much you share online, but as business and personal life become even more intermixed, working with privacy settings and lists is a great tool.

Guest Post: When Business Is Personal: Using Facebook Privacy Settings