Facebook How To: Customizing Your Status Updates

Did you know you can hide your status updates from select “friends” on Facebook? A relatively new feature, this is one of my favorite security updates that Facebook has done in awhile.

I have a lot of “friends” of Facebook. Now clearly in the world of Social Media, a “friend” is a pretty loose word used to describe your network of direct connections on Facebook, Myspace, and other such outlets. Many of these Facebook friends are (“in real life”) friends of mine, but there are many people on my friends list I haven’t seen in over a decade. And I think I’m not alone when I say that I have more than a few “friends” that are just acquaintances, in actuality. While it’s handy and fun and very interesting to keep in touch with people from the various times and travels in my life, sometimes what I want to share on my personal page with my good friends isn’t necessarily what I want to share with a girl I met a few times through a friend of a friend who found and friend requested me online. Facebook seems to have finally caught onto that sentiment, and introduced a more customized experience for when you type your latest favorite quote in the box that begs the question, “What’s on your mind?”

Here’s how you customize who can and cannot see your status updates.

1. Sign into your Facebook Account, and click the Status Update bar. You can find this at the top of your News Feed on your Home Page,or to the right of your profile photo on your personal profile page (this goes for your business page as well)*Facebook tip: you’ll often see people write their status updates in the third person. Because your status update show up in your friends’ news feeds immediately after your name, you can use your name as the beginning of your update. For instance: in my status update box, I might write “is writing a blog post.” This will show up in my friends’ news feed next to a thumbnail of my profile photo, my name as I’ve opted to show it on my Facebook account, and my status update. So it reads like, “ Erin Inatsugu is writing a blog entry.”
2. Type in your status update, and before you hit the “Share” button, notice the little lock icon to the left of the share button.
   Clicking this lock allows you to choose who will see that particular post both in their news feed as well as on your profile page. You can choose to show everyone, friends of friends, friends only, or you can get even more specific and customize – meaning you can allow or disallow select people to see your status update.
3. Choose “Customize”.
   
   A dialogue box will pop up,
   
   giving you the option to “make visible” to certain people from your friends list
   
   or, if you’d rather narrow it down by people you do NOT want to see the posting, you can type in friends’ names to “Hide this from”.
   You can even choose to make this your default setting by checking the box in the bottom left corner of the dialogue box. Then hit “Save Setting”.
   
   *Keep in mind that this is different than your default privacy settings, which will override any privacy customizations you make to your individual postings. If you have your profile set to “private” overall, for instance, choosing the option to allow “everyone” to see your posting will not allow Facebook users who are not on your friends list to see that posting.
4. This will close the dialogue box and bring you back to your status update in progress. Simply hit “Share”, and you’re done. To verify that your settings were saved, just roll your cursor over the little lock icon next to your posted update, and you’ll see a box pop up that displays the setting you’ve chosen.