How to control sharing your Facebook data using friends lists?

Few days ago Facebook launched a new functionality – Friends lists. You may have not even noticed them, which means the functionality is not critical for your Facebook activity. However, if you look deeper into it, then you discover how handy they are.

First of all, Facebook is international and so are many of our friends. This always gave a bit of colour to our walls, cause for example on my wall everyone could see Polish language mixed with some German, English and Turkish :) No offence to everyone but since I don’t really speak all of these languages I wouldn’t mind skipping my humble person from recipients of some of these messages. I bet some of my friends would say the same to me right now. The lists are the solution to the problem and I made a short video tutorial at the end of the article to show you how to create them.

If you write a news on your wall and click on the small arrow next to the share button, you’ll see that you can choose Customise and then Specific people. Next, you’ll be able to choose people to whom you want to write. The news will only be seen by those people whom you chose, so for example my English speaking friends won’t be bothered with my Polish posts. But how the lists help you in all this? They work like aliases for emails, so if you create a list of friends then instead of choosing each time all the names of many friends you want to write to, you simply type in the name of the list, and that’s it. Handy, right?

Lists also give you the possibility to view news feeds from different friends separately. Hence, if you click Friends beneath your profile picture, you will see all the names of your lists. Next, you choose one of the lists and preview of the news from those friends will appear on the news feed.

For commercial purposes lists may become a handy subgroups of your friends with whom you will or will not want to share your Facebook data. Imagine, you want to become influential on Facebook so you accept each friend invitation. You don’t really know most of your friends in a real life but they are in a group of your friends, meaning they can see all of your pictures, personal info etc. Now lists make it easier to choose groups of people with whom you will share the sensitive data.

You probably now wonder how you can create these lists and how you can manage privacy issues on your Facebook account. Of course, nothing simpler. Follow the instructions from my video (see below) and you should have no problems.

Of course, in case of any questions or hesitations just comment or write to me.