I recently signed up for an online course that came with a private Facebook group. I was not thrilled about it being on Facebook, but given that I wanted to get the most out of the class begrudgingly created an account and joined the group. A few weeks after that I started hearing about other private Facebook groups for podcasts or books I really liked and joined them as well.
I’m surprised and impressed with the quality and level of interactions in these groups. If you know me at all you know I don’t care for Facebook and have never had a presence there. Facebook is just one more place to maintain my online presence run by a company I just don’t trust when it comes to having the best interests of their users at heart.
I continually get the impressions that Facebook (the company) is all about making sure they get more from the platform than the users, including their approach to privacy. It’s possible I’ve read it all wrong, but I’ve been extremely turned off in the past by what I’ve heard about Facebook’s approach to user privacy–creating a gauntlet of and hard to find settings and default settings that leave new users wide open to sharing everything.
I get that social networks are not necessarily about privacy, people are on them after all to share things publicly. I think, however, that there’s no good reason to set such liberal default open privacy settings. With all this in mind (and perhaps fears based on out-dated information) I setup a Facebook account with a unique email address (to see how it gets tracked or used, and also to break the chain between my Facebook email address and other social networks).
I realize there are other ways to draw associations with my other networks using ip address lookup, cookies, etc. so it was also an experiment. Once I had my account created I also set the privacy settings as I high as I could… is it working? Who knows. I was surprised that within a week, two people I had barely corresponded with over GMail suddenly wanted to be friends on Facebook.
My attitude about Facebook has changed slightly given the highly helpful and positive private groups I’ve joined. The interface and notifications process is smooth and beats the those classic online web forums that are so ugly and difficult to navigate.
So now that I’ve joined some of these groups and am meeting new and interesting people, I’d like to stay in contact with them. The problem is I don’t want to “friend” a bunch of people or be “friended “by others so I feel stuck. So far I don’t have any “friends” on Facebook, though I have received some “friend requests.” I really don’t want to have a new group of people to track and stay in touch with on Facebook. Is that short-sighted?
I’m already on three major social networks.
LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnpoelstra
Twitter — https://twitter.com/johnpoelstra
Google+ — https://plus.google.com/+JohnPoelstra
I like LinkedIn for keeping track of people connections and Twitter for general sharing and seeing what’s going on. I also like Google+, but am not as active there. So far I just haven’t seen the need for Facebook.
In my perfect world, I could have a Facebook page, wall, whatever, whereby someone could see the following:
- My name and that I’m there
- Other social networks I’m on
- A short block of text encouraging people that want to connect with me to do so on one of the networks I’m already on, with links to those networks and a short block of text maybe explaining that I’m not maintaining connections on Facebook.
- A simple way of contacting me
My two questions are:
1) How can I make the scenario I’ve proposed above work on Facebook or is it a bad idea?
2) What am I missing or should I reconsider about having a larger presence on Facebook and if so, why?
I haven’t been able to figure this out using the Google. Does anyone have good overall suggestions or an approach that works given my preferences?
October 27, 2014 at 10:41 pm
I wrote three full comments and deleted all of them LOL. Let me know if you’d like to chat about Facebook sometime. I’d be happy to give you my millennial perspective.
October 30, 2014 at 4:10 am
Writing three comments and then deciding not to post them. Sounds like me! I do that a lot too.
October 30, 2014 at 6:58 am
I’d love to get your perspective and approach too. What’s the best way to connect up and chat?
October 26, 2014 at 7:16 am
John, I certainly understand where you’re coming from on this post. I struggle with the thought of what Facebook should be for me. One one hand, I almost need it to maintain some of the friendships that I’ve made in my life. It is very helpful to see what my friends and family are up to. Today, many of them only advertise important life events on Facebook, and unless I check my feed, I won’t know that anything happened. Pregnancies, engagements, marriages and moves are all announced on Facebook first. I went a few months while only using Facebook sparingly and missed a lot of news! Your friends may not be as engaged on Facebook as mine, but the ones that are using it daily do not often consider those who don’t have Facebook accounts.
When it comes to your personal “brand” on Facebook, there are three big areas that you would want to consider. The first would be your profile privacy. Since you have it all set to high, other people who are not your friends can only see your name and your picture. That’s it. I know that the default settings for Facebook allows the public to search for you by email address, which would explain your new friend requests. You can turn that off by going to Privacy Shortcuts, then More Settings.
There are a lot of ways to fine-tune the settings so non-friends would see other parts like “About me” and your work history. You can put links to your other social media pages there. There are also ways to fine-tune your profile so that some friends can’t see everything. You’re not required to fill in all the information for your profile, although Facebook pushes you to do that. If you do, make sure to go back and regularly maintain and update that information.
Note: To manage the privacy of your profile information, you do not access it through the “privacy” settings. This is tricky and I’m sure Facebook does this on purpose. You’ll need to click on Update Info on your profile page first. Then, under each section, you can change your privacy settings for each item. For example, under my work history, I can choose to allow Close Friends to see one job, and then allow only myself to see another job. Doing this would allow you to advertise likes to your other social media pages, and limit other things in your profile to “only me”.
The next part is to consider your friendships. I think this might be where you are struggling. If you don’t want Facebook to have a lot of information about you, and you don’t plan on using it for your private friendships, I wouldn’t worry about who your “friends” are, because the amount of information available to them is minimal. More friends will equate to more noise in your news feeds. The upside to being liberal with adding friends that is messages with friends show up in your Facebook inbox, but ones from people who aren’t friends go into this lesser-known “other” message inbox. This might be useful to know if you’re communicating with people that you meet in the private Facebook groups that you’re joining. This is more of the “networking” way to use Facebook.
If you want to make Facebook more personal, and decide to populate a lot of information in your profile, you could set standards for who gets to be your friend. You may be tempted to add someone that doesn’t meet the standard, but remember that it’s slippery slope. I’ve tried it a few times and didn’t do so well. Also, don’t be afraid to un-friend someone who isn’t relevant to your life anymore. It will make Facebook more relevant to your personal life.
The final thing to consider is what you post and who sees it. Like Google+, you can be very granular with your posts and limit who sees them. For privacy settings, the little globe in the posts means public, a lock means only you, and silhouettes mean that it’s for friends. You can even put people into groups and post only to a specific friend-group. For example, you could have a lot of friends, but also have a Close Friends group. Then you can post things that only Close Friends would be able to see (or more likely, actually care about seeing). This is probably the most useful, but also most underused and least advertised part of Facebook’s security settings. You could also create groups around jobs, schools, locations, and whatever else make sense for you.
I hope this information helps you out!
November 9, 2014 at 6:50 pm
Hi Brain,
Thanks for all this super information. I’ve been giving it all some thought. I really like your point about what kinds of “friends” I will keep in touch with on Facebook. I’m not using Facebook to keep in touch with the friends I’ve known the longest and I’m seeing increasing opportunities for getting a lot more out of using some the community features Facebook offers.
In addition, since the origination of several contacts is now happening on Facebeook I can see where it would make sense to “friend” them for direct messaging, staying in contact, etc.
And, as one friend recently challenged me on… “If you use your credit card at any store you’ve given up a bunch of privacy already. You don’t use cash for everything, do you?”