Now that you know why it’s important to protect your privacy on Facebook, as well as how to change privacy settings, we’ll teach you an advanced method of privacy protection: organizing your friends into lists.
What are Facebook lists, and why are they important?
Facebook Lists are important because they allow you to categorize the people in your network (your “friends”). This allows you to fine-tune your privacy settings by selecting which friends can or cannot see certain information that you put on Facebook.
You can create lists for family, close friends, and more. In fact, there are specific lists that are already available to you – you just need to add people into them. There’s also the option to create and name your own list.
Types of Facebook Lists
Facebook lists that are already available to you include Close Friends, Acquaintances, and Restricted.
Close friends – This Facebook friends list allows you to add in your best friends. By default, Facebook will send you notifications if people in this list post anything. Of course, you can turn these notifications off if you so choose.
Acquaintances – This list is for people with whom you don’t interact often. Their posts will rarely show up at the top of your News Feed. Also, by clicking the Audience Selector, you will have the option to select “friends except acquaintances” if you don’t want them to see your posts.
Restricted – This list is for friends that you’ve added, but don’t want to share content with at all. People added to this list will only be able to see content that you’ve marked as “Public” or posts that you’ve tagged them in.
Custom Lists –A custom list allows you to name it whatever you’d like and add whomever you’d like to create your own unique list. You can also choose custom privacy settings for the friends on the list, such as what information they are allowed to see and whether or not they are allowed to send you messages. An example of this could be “Book Club Members” or “Extended Family.”
How to Create a List
- If you want to create your own list, you can select More in the “Friends” section on the left hand menu.
- This will take you to all of the lists that you have, and you will have the option to Create List at the top of the page.
- Here, you can name your list whatever you’d like and add whomever you’d like to create your own unique list. Click Create when you are done.
Add Friends To A List
- On the left-hand menu on your homepage (Timeline),under the “Friends” section, select the list that you’d like to add friends to. If you don’t see the list, select More.This will bring you to the page with all of your lists.
- Click on the name of the list you’d like to add friends to.
- Click inside the box in the top-right corner that says “Add Friends To This List”, and type in your friend’s name. Then click Add.
How to Manage Lists
- If you want to see what one group of friends is up to, select their list.This will bring you to a page that is like a News Feed, but only includes posts from the friends on your list. This is useful because it allows you to see what your group of friends is up to, without having to individually search for the profiles of each friend.
- To make a change to a list, whether it’s removing a friend from the list or changing the list’s name, go back to the left-hand menu and select More in the “Friends” section. Click on the list that you want to edit.At the top of the page, click Manage List.
- From here you can do a few things. Clicking Rename List allows you to change the list’s name, while Edit List allows you to find and remove people from the list. Clicking any of the options below “Updates to Show” lets you choose what kinds of updates you (don’t) receive from the friends in the list. And Delete List gets rid of the list if you don’t want it anymore.
And that’s a quick overview of how to use lists on Facebook!
