The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Privacy Settings
1. Creating Friend Lists
This first step is perhaps the most essential because it sets the groundwork for much of the remainder of the process. In this segment, however, you will not actually be modifying any privacy settings. Instead, you will organize your friends into lists to which you will later assign access permissions.
I organized my friend lists based on how I know each of my friends. I created lists such as “College Friends,” “High School Friends,” “Online Friends,” etc. I like this method because it allows me to easily assign new friends to one of these categories; however, sometimes this method creates limitations by preventing you from assigning more specific permissions to certain subcategories of friends. For that reason, I recommend that you create lists related to the degree of access you want your friends to have, such as “Close Friends” (including relatives and close friends), “General Friends” (including most friends), “Acquaintances,” etc. Even something such as “A,” “B,” “C” or “1,” “2,” “3” would work. Both the names and method of categorization are up to your discretion.
To begin, log into your Facebook account and go to the Friends —> All Friends page. Once there, you will see in the left sidebar a section that displays current friend lists. Click “Make a New List” to get started. Facebook will guide you through this process fairly well, but we will continue to walk through it.
You must first name your friend list (see my comments above). For this process, I’ll choose the name “Close Friends.”
After naming your friend list, you will begin adding friends to the list. You have two options in doing so: you may type in individual names and select your friends one-by-one, or you may select multiple friends from a complete friends’ list. For shorter lists (for example, I have a “Family” list which only consists of about 10 people), the first option is more practical because it allows you to avoid scrolling through countless faces. For most lists, though, the second option makes a much more sense. Furthermore, I highly recommend using the “Filter Friends” drop-down. When I created a “College Friends” friend list, the ability to filter out everyone but my friends from one network shortened the process substantially. Regardless, select all friends to be placed in this list, then click “Save List.”
Repeat this process with other friend lists. Beware: this is undoubtedly the most tedious part of the process, especially if you have a large number of friends. I spent well over an hour adding friends to my lists.
Once you have finished creating your friend lists, you are ready to apply privacy settings to these newly created groupings of friends.
Next page: Step 2: Profile Settings