Ed. note: I’ll update this with screenshots someday if I ever get a working internet connection. Until then, I hope the written instructions are clear enough.

With over 15 million users, you’ve probably been invited by at least a dozen folks to be their friend on Facebook. It’s an easy, fun way to keep in touch and spread news quickly…but it can also be an easy way to lose a good measure of privacy and mix your personal and professional lives a little more than you might like. Used correctly, Facebook is a powerful professional tool with lots of good PD uses regardless of your position. While some of this is geared to FSO-types, any professional would do well to take on a few of these. In this post, I’m going to focus on securing your profile to separate your friends from professional contacts, extensions for Foreign Service folks, professional Facebook etiquette, and social networking alternatives. Read on after the jump:

Securing your profile – Make an “Inner Circle”

As a lot of my friends are tired of hearing, I’m a long-time Facebook user. U.Va. was one of the first schools The Facebook (as it was then known) expanded to, and you needed a virginia.edu email address to get invited. Given that everyone on the network was a college friend (and, likely, was still in college), you could post those photos from the parties that went too late and make snide or ironic comments to your heart’s content. Several times over the years, I’ve been stung by Facebook’s ever widening pool of users (to the amusement of some of the friends who found pictures or interests intended for my college cadre). Fortunately, Facebook has more or less grown up as I have, and you can now exercise a fair amount of control over who can see what and still show your true friends the real you.

Note: throughout this post I’ll use “friend” to mean a real, trusted friend. “Public” will mean anyone you’ve given access to your profile, which Facebook refers to as a friend.

First, you’ll need to decide what your “default profile” should be: for your real friends or the general public. It’s safer and easier to make your default the general public view. Likely information on that page would be a nice photo of you, your current location and job, maybe some benign information like your favorite bands or movies. Nothing you wouldn’t put in a public biography (which is exactly what Facebook is).

Next, you’ll want to set up a “friend list”. Here’s the step-by-step:

  1. Click on the “Friends” tab at the top of any Facebook page.
  2. On the left side of the screen, you’ll see a header for “Friend lists”. Choose to add a new one, naming it something easy like “close friends” or “full access”.
  3. A box will come up asking you to add friends to the list. Click the link that says, “add multiple friends,” which will show a little photo of each friend. Click each person you’d like added to the list, making sure to check the multiple screens you’re likely to have. When you’re done, save.
  4. Ta-da! You have your first friend list. Now it’s time to set privacy options. On any Facebook screen, put your mouse over (but don’t click) “Settings” at the upper-right of your screen. A menu will drop down where you’ll select “Privacy Settings”.
  5. Go ahead and start out with “Profile,” where most of your data is anyway. On each subsection of your profile, there’s a drop-down menu that lets you choose who can see that portion of your profile. For things in your “public” view, go ahead and select “only friends.” For things you only want close friends to see, select “Custom” and a box will pop up. Type in the name of the friend list you created before and you’re set!

Make enough lists to suit your needs

The Economist ran an interesting article updating the 20-year-old “core network” theory to the facebook era. The result? While the average facebooker has aorund 120 friends, most people have a core group of 5-10 people with whom they interact. (The original study says that it is difficult for us to manage real-life social networks of more than 150 – but my guess is that FSOs need to be outliers in this to be successful in our jobs). I currently have 612 “friends” on facebook, and managing that number requires a bit of time investment. It can be awkward to “deny” a friend request, so I have four levels of privacy: a “whitelist” for full access, a “blacklist” for purely professional contacts, and two others in between where I can control what parts people see – a key place is my status upgrade because I don’t always think before I type…I don’t need the whole world to see that I really enjoyed my pizza and beer last night and other comments may be more embarrasing or personal (announcing a family birth or death, for example) than you want to broadcast. I also have a bunch of lists for easy messaging or searching: high school friends (so I can see more updates around reunion times), local friends at a particular post (so I can send batch messages without having to manually enter them each time), and my A-100 classmates. People can belong to more than one list – make sure you only set your privacy settings based on your three- or four-tiered system so you don’t get confused.

The blog AllFacebook has an excellent post on scrubbing up the last bits. For FSOs, finding the balance between easy searching to facilitate PD efforts and contact work and keeping facebook private enough for you to use in your close relationships means carefully grooming your privacy settings – but after that initial work each new contact can be sorted when you request or confirm the connection. It’s well worth the time to set it up and do a periodic review to keep FB an effective tool for communicating with friends and family back home while presenting a good face to business contacts.

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