In the last couple of weeks, I have run several training sessions and I am finding myself getting asked the same question over and over so I have decided that this must be an issue that is worrying a lot of people.
Privacy concerns are very real and quite valid when it comes to stamping your presence online. Facebook does allow you to control your privacy settings which can assist in who is able to see your personal profile.
To review the privacy settings on your personal account, you need to go in to the Settings area of your account. This can be found in the top right hand corner of your account where there is a drop down menu.
You need to go on to the options Settings and then within this area, you will need to select the Security option as per the image below.
It is within the Security area that you can select import preferences such as trusted contacts as well as how you log in to your account.
The Privacy section is where you will need to make selections about who can see your account your posts and so forth.
Again, you need to make some personal choices here about who can see your personal profile, who can see your posts and who can contact you. All of these options are editable so my suggestion would be to click on them and see what options are available and then choose the one that best fits how you would like to use your account.
Business and personal pages.
One concern that many business owners have is the visibility of their personal profile when it is linked to the business page. If you have your business page listed on your personal page then people are able to connect you and your business. However, if your security settings are high on your personal page, people who have LIKED your business page are not able to see any of your personal details. If you are concerned about people accessing your personal details, the best advice I can give is do not load them on to Facebook in the first place.
Please note that in order to have a business page on Facebook, you do need to have a personal profile. There is no way around this but rest assured that you do not need to enter your entire life story to set up your personal account.
Using your personal account
As Facebook becomes increasingly popular, many people are finding themselves ‘friends’ on Facebook with people that they may be connected to professionally. If you have professional connections in your friends list, then you can also manage this quite well by setting up your own ‘lists’ within Facebook. By setting up lists, you can choose who sees what updates. This means if you want to share lots of personal information and photos, it does not need to go out to every single person on your friends list.
If you are interested in sorting out your friends in to lists as well as giving your personal account a serious tidy up, I would highly recommend this video. It is just over an hour long but WOW it contains some great information on successfully managing your personal account. Click here to go to the video.
Good luck with working on your personal profile settings. I believe it is a simple task that we often overlook when we set up our account.
