Facebook is a great way to connect with people, both personally and for business reasons, but you need to be careful about what you post and who you let see it. Once something is public on the internet, there is really no way to "reel it in" - it's out there forever. In this article, we're going to look at a few things you should do to improve your privacy on Facebook.
The first step to making your Facebook experience more secure is to turn on browsing on a secure connection. By default, Facebook doesn't use a secure connection after you log in. The login page is secured but after that, it's not.
This means that if you're on a public wireless network anybody "sniffing" the data could potentially take over your connection and pretend to be you. Tools like Firesheep make this easy to do for anyone, even if they're not technically oriented. By turning on the secure connection option in your Facebook privacy settings, you'll always be connected securely (https:// rather than http://) so all your data is hidden from prying eyes.
It's also important to go through your privacy settings and really think about what you want to be publicly visible. Do you want your photos, status updates and other information to be visible to anyone searching for it, or only people with whom you're connected?
Again, once something is available publicly, it can be hard to reverse. Even if you change your profile to limit it later on, all your information could already be indexed by Google and other search engines, making it very difficult to get rid of.
You can also adjust some settings for Facebook Ads, which affect how your name is attached to those ads. Facebook's social ads will show your name alongside an ad for a Facebook Page or another website that you have "liked." If you don't want your name to show up there, you can turn this off in the Facebook Ads settings in your account profile.
If you're using Facebook for both business and personal reasons, it's important to keep all these things in mind. While you might want everything you post to your business' Page to be visible publicly, chances are you don't want that same visibility for your personal information.
By going through and tweaking the default security settings (which aren't particularly strong) you can help to "lock down" your personal information while maintaining a public presence for your business.
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One of the most important aspects of Facebook is the interaction with other people. This is why it's called a "social" media site. There are a number of ways you can interact with people, however, and they all work a little differently. In this article we're going to look at a few tips for engaging your audience.
The first thing you need to remember is that Facebook is a social site. It's not meant to be a broadcast medium like email. You don't want to simply send out messages to your friends, you want to encourage them to interact with you. That might be through discussion (comments) on the things you do share or it might be more direct, such as private messages.
When you're interacting with people, it's important to think about who should be able to see the information you're sharing. Do you want all your friends or all someone else's friends to see it? If so, you can post an update or post a message on a friend's wall.
But maybe you only want certain people to see it, say your business connections but not your personal friends. In this case you can either limit who sees it using lists or you can post it to your Facebook Page, which has a much more targeted group of followers.
In other cases, it might be something that's best kept private between you and the other party. In that case, a private message is going to be the best option.
Facebook recently added the ability to post as a Page, which means that everything you do will appear to be coming from your Page instead of you personally.
eg. If you have a page called "My Business Page" when you post a message on someone's wall, it will show My Business Page and the profile picture of your Page, not your personal information.
This lets you interact with people on the level that you are connected with them, rather than dealing with everyone on a personal level through your main account.
It can be easy to post something in a way that makes it visible to people that you might prefer not to see it. Make sure that you're aware of how you're logged in and what method you use to post something before you say something on Facebook. Otherwise you might find yourself in an uncomfortable situation, and once something has been posted it's hard to undo.
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