Facebook Profiles: How to Maximize Connections with Clients (Part 2)
*Video Update: 16 Febuary 2011 – How to List your Facebook Friends!
Part 2: Maintaining Privacy (or Separating Church and State)
In the last post, I explained how to simply find your contacts on Facebook – be sure to do this regularly, by the way, as more people are joining Facebook everyday. A client that was not there this month, may be there next month. This post will describe how to create friend lists, so that you can customize to whom you show information.
On to Privacy!
As mentioned in the previous post, you may want to put information on your Facebook that is not intended for all “friends” to see. It is possible to customize the privacy of each post, each photo album, etc. (Yay!)
You’ll notice that when you click on the “What’s on your mind” box to update your status, or post something, a whole bunch of little icons appear underneath the box. One of those icons is a little lock – if you click on it, you’ll get a drop down list of options where you can choose who can see that status update or posted item.
Notice that one of the options in the drop down list is called “customize”. If you click on it, you can enter individual people to show this post, or whom to exclude from seeing this post. Better yet, you can select a list of people to see or not see this post by entering the name of the list.
Listing Your Facebook Friends
In order to best use this little feature, I recommend that you list all of your Facebook Friends. For example, I have a lists entitled: Family & Friends, Realtors & Real Estate, Competitors, People I don’t really know, etc. I can exclude REALTORS® from competing companies in Whistler from seeing tips I post by clicking on the lock, clicking “Customize” and typing the name of the list (Competitors) in the “Hide this from” field. Or, I can show only my “Family & Friends” List my wedding pictures by following these steps:
- Select the Album from Photos,
- Click “Edit Album Info” at the bottom of the screen,
- Under “Privacy” select “Customize”,
- Select “Specific People” from the “Make This Visible to” drop down menu
- Type in the name of the list (Friends & Family) in the space provided.
So, how do you create these “lists”? There are several ways to do this, but I recommend following these simple steps:
- From the “Home” screen, Click on “Friends” (left hand side)
- At the top right hand side of the Friends screen, click on “Edit Friends”
- At the top right hand side of the next screen, click on +Create List
- A window will pop-up; Enter a name for the new list
- Click on Friends to add them to this list
- When finished, click “Create List”
- To add new people to an existing list, just follow steps 1 & 2 and select an existing list from the lists on the left hand side of the screen
Now, once you have your lists created, when you add a new friend, you can automatically add them to a list when you send them a Friend Request, or when you accept a Friend Request from them:
That’s it! You’re done. Now you can be friends with everyone, while keeping certain things more or less private, according to your needs.
While you are now capable of separating Church and State, Business and Personal, it is necessary to understand what every anthropologist and historian already knows – each influences the other. We all know that we get the best business referrals from our physical world friends, and the best way to connect with a client is to be personable with them. So, you probably want to keep your friends and family abreast of what you’re doing in your professional life, and you need to let your clients get to know you as a person as well. Next time, I’ll review the difference between personable and private and how we can still be personable with our business contacts without being too personal. Until then…Keep it real, keep it interesting, but most of all, keep them listed!
HOMEWORK: List all of your Facebook Friends!
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