My colleague Joel Abrams is a social media rock star. He just sent a memo to our newsroom with some great advice on handling privacy settings on Facebook, and how to enable the new “subscribe” feature. Here’s what he recommends:

Go to http://www.facebook.com/about/subscribe and click the big subscribe button.   Allow ‘everyone’ to comment on your items (so that they can share things you post with their friends)

Next, you may want to change your privacy settings to limit who can ask to be your ‘friend’.  From the blue bar at the top of the screen, pull down the menu at far right and choose ‘Privacy settings’.   Choose your default privacy setting – you probably want it to be ‘friends’, unless you want to share everything with everybody.

Next click on the ‘edit settings’ link next to “How you connect”.

My recommendations:

-          Who can look you up by name?  Everyone (but everyone won’t be able to see everything you post)

-          Who can send you friend requests?  Friends of friends (ie, they need to know a person who’s already your ‘friend’)

-          Who can send you Facebook messages?  Everyone (as with having a public email address, it makes you seem more trustworthy and approachable; you can always disregard and small amount of spam)

-          Who can post on your wall? Pick ‘only me’ or ‘friends’.

-          Who can see wall posts by others? Friends

Next click on the “Manage Past Post Visibility” next to “Limit the Audience for Past Posts” – this will make anything you unknowingly posted to the whole world private, if you so choose.

Last, click on your profile – your name in the top blue bar.  This will be morphing into your ‘timeline’ soon, an aggregation of all your Facebook activity, ever.  Click the ‘Edit profile’ button. On the Basic Information tab, you can go through each item of information and specify whether you want it shared with the world, your friends, or mutual friends.

Still confused by Facebook’s ever-changing features? Then take the advice of my man Joel, and check out these tips from Facebook’s own anointed journalism guru, Vadim Lavrusik:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/57043299/Journalists-and-Facebook

http://www.scribd.com/doc/65215914/Subscribe-for-Journalists

What advice would you give to fellow journalists on Facebook? We’d love to hear more about this….so please share your tips in the comments below.

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This entry was posted by Emily Sweeney on Tuesday, October 4th, 2011 at 3:09 pm and is filed under Learning, Social Media, Social Networking, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.