If you are not one of the more than 350 million Facebook users, this blog may not be very informative to you.  If that’s the case I suggest checking out our Eleventh Hour site and our 11thr Production Services for all your staffing opportunities and needs.

If you are a part of the largest social networking community, it will be in your best interest to review your privacy settings.  Some of the new changes have created some criticism so it’s best to see which settings work best for you.  These five tips below helped me with my settings so in the holiday spirit I figured I’d pass them along to you.

1. Search Settings — The search settings for your account may have reset with recent changes so if you wouldn’t like your information to come up through Google and other search listings, go to Settings>Privacy Settings>Search and deselecting “Allow indexing” if you prefer to keep your information hidden.
2. Public Availability Information Changes — This is information that Facebook has chosen to keep public no matter if you like it or not.  It includes your profile picture, friends list, fan pages, gender and the region or network you are in.  At this point this information cannot be withheld from the public so you may want to think twice about your fan pages if you are not comfortable sharing with the entire world.
3. Friend Lists — Despite the fact that people can find your friend list from outside Facebook, once within the site you are able to hide your friend list once you’re on your profile page.  To hide your friend list simply click the pencil icon within your Friends section in the left margin below your profile picture and deselect the box that says “Show my friends on my profile.”
   
4. Hyper Control — Although public availability information above is open for all to see, there are new ways to restrict others from the content you are posting.  If you don’t want certain ‘friends’ to see your latest update or wall posting, you are now able to choose who can and can’t see those actions on an individual basis.
5. Password Protection Layer — This layer was added to protect users when changing your private settings.  This newly added policy asks the user to re-enter their password to adjust their private settings.  However if you do decide to change these settings and return back to your profile beware that your privacy settings may still be accessible, even when logging out and logging back in.  Hopefully Facebook will make changes to this issue or at least let users know the setting will time out at some point.

Hopefully these topics gave you a head start towards getting your Facebook account as private or as open as you would like.

Matt Suttner has his Facebook account on lock down or at least as much as Mark Zuckerberg will allow.