Keeping personal and business Facebook activities separate

Summary – Video Script

This module has been created for those with a personal user account rather than a business account. Business accounts are limited in functionality e.g. you can’t receive or send out friend requests as they are intended purely for users who want to administer Pages and Ad campaigns.

However if you are going to be on Facebook it does make sense to have a personal account so you can use it in the same way that your customers do; this will help you to understand how the functionality really works.

Back to the module topic – how do you keep your home/social facebook activity and your work separate?

There are five steps shown in this module and some of them will show you privacy settings in Facebook. The video has been re-cut following Facebook’s privacy settings update at the end of August 2011.

Step One

Be aware of when you are interacting as you the individual, or you the page entity; this will help you know when your real name is shown or when it is your page name.

If you click on your Account drop down, it will show your page’s name or your own name. Alternately, click on your home page…if you are taken to your page’s wall, then you are using Facebook as your page.

Be aware that when you are adding a comment or posting on a page wall that you admin it is shown as your page that is posting.

There is more information on pages and how to use pages with the later modules.

Step Two

Work through your list of friends in your personal account and group them (use Account drop down and the link to Edit Friends that you see at the top right hand of your page). In the third step you will grant different levels of visibility to different groups; so think about each group for example you could create a group for work colleagues, for family, for clients. Remember that you can amend your friend lists at any time.

With the changes released in August 2011, you can also access/amend your friend lists by editing your Profile, we’ll look at editing your profile in Step Three.

Step Three

In this step you are checking the level of visibility that you have set for your profile information, before going on to check your privacy settings.

Click on your profile and then click to Edit your profile. At the left hand side of the page you will see the different groups of profile information from basic info, profile picture, friends and family information. Work through each group, checking the information and using the drop downs to check the visibility e.g. global, friends only or only me. For some fields you are allowed to customise the visibility and select specific friends or friend lists to hide/show it from/to. 

At any time you can check what your profile looks like by clicking on the View As link and then entering your friend’s name or clicking to view your public profile i.e. as a non-friend would see it.

Use the Account drop down and click on the link called Privacy Settings. The first half of this page shows additional information with links to edit your profile or to learn more about privacy settings and sharing information.

Scroll down the page to the section called Control Your Default Privacy and you can see three options: Public, Friend and Custom. You can select one of these and it will always be chosen as your preferred setting, by using Custom you can choose who you wish to show/hide information from. This will be used by applications and when you are in Facebook and can access the inline audience selector you can always amend this on specific posts.

Once you have set a default, work through the links shown underneath e.g. How you connect, How tags work. Click on Edit Settings to review and amend who is allowed to search for you or send you friend requests.

It is worth highlighting the section called Apps and Websites, although applications have a standard set of information that will always be required e.g. your name and profile pic, applications do request additional information and you can view and amend their level of access through this link.

When you are in the Apps and Websites page, click on Edit settings for the Apps you use and review each application, you may see apps that you have allowed to post on your wall or to manage your pages. You can reduce their access or remove the app from this page.

Applications include features such as groups, photos, notes and videos. It is worthwhile checking through each of the items shown in the different drop down choices and checking what permissions it has e.g. writing on your wall or sending you a notification.

Work through the other links shown in the Apps and Websites page to review how people bring your information to the apps that they use i.e. your friends.

Step Four

Your privacy settings will now show different levels of information about you to the different lists of friends you have set up.

When you are doing a status update, as well as being able to include a friend tag and check in, you can also control the visibility of that one update. So if you have defaulted your privacy to just friends, you can set a specific update to be visible publicly i.e. to people you haven’t set as friends or make it more private by sending it to just one or two friends or a friend list.

Step Five

The final one is to ensure that you return to these settings every few months and review your friends lists and the privacy settings incase Facebook has made any amendments, you want to reorganise your friends or you have started to use a new application with Facebook.

Next Steps

You’ve got your user account and are ready to create your page or perhaps start to interact with others in Groups, the online guides being loaded up soon will cover both these topics.