Excuse Me, Your Facebook Friends are Showing!

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A friend posted today on Facebook. He was rather perturbed. Someone, a “friend” of his on Facebook was reaching out and attempting to friend a bunch of his friends!

This happened to me a while back, both on Facebook and also LinkedIn, where a former co-worker thought it was “okay” to start connecting to folks I know at market research companies that I have had a long standing relationship with. One connection contacted me and said “Who IS this guy?”, then I heard from another with a similar inquiry. I put a stop to that right away.

And another funny occurrence. I noticed a Facebook friend, Ellen (not her real name), had broken off with her fiancé. I had never met her X nor was I friends with him. About a week after the breakup I received a friend request and later found that the X was reaching out to many of Ellen’s female friends. He was going through Ellen's friend list! Needless to say, I didn’t friend back. Creepy!

Once thing is certain; there’s lots of good reasons to hide your friend list from your friends. Facebook’s default is to show all your friends. Perhaps this is an effort in good faith to let people that know each other connect, and hey, that may be perfectly okay for you if your desire is to max out at 5,000 friends as soon as possible! Some of us prefer staying under the radar though.

So here’s how you can make that change:

• Go to your wall, or profile page, or whatever you want to call it.
• Click on “Friends” just under your cover art, in that row of options in blue.
• Click the edit button (see pic below)

•  Select Edit Privacy (we'll get to Edit Sections later). Two options in there.

The first section is Friend Lists. Click on the drop down on the right.

Now you get to choose an option! Public, Friends, Only Me, Custom, or any lists you’ve created. Setting to Only Me will hide your friend’s list with the exception of the mutual friends you have in common; they’ll still be visible.


The second section is Following. This is where you control whether or not you want people to see that you are following a particular person (if they are a more “public” person you can follow instead of friend) or any lists that you’re following. 

Edit Sections will bring a long list of items; these are the things you can choose to show or not to show on your wall, including Instagram pics, Pinterest pins, and likes in catagories such as books, games, TV show, movies. It may be a great time to hide all those old “notes”, like the 25 songs chosen at random from your ipod or how many states you visited; remember those?

Now that your friends are “secret” we know that The Go-Go’s won’t tell a soul (see video below). And our lips are sealed when we conduct custom marketing for your business; being ethical is a given. Stop by our our website, or stop by on Twitter, Facebook, or Google+.