I’ve been using Facebook for a long time, and so have many of my Facebook friends, but some things about it are just not intuitive.
Who Can See What You Posted?
Here’s an issue that crops up a lot for me, because I only share to Friends, rarely ever to Public. So what happens is I post a link to an article, then one of my friends thinks it’s great (thanks!), and then Shares it directly from Facebook, rather than clicking on the link and posting from the link. (The depressing thing about this is that they may not have even looked at the link at all, just saw the headline and pressed Share underneath.)
The trouble is that the thing they just shared will only be visible to themselves and the Mutual Friends we happen to have, if any. Everyone else will just see “Attachment Unavailable” or something like that.
I’m guessing a lot of folks are using Facebook on their Phones and either can’t see or aren’t aware of the icons (below) that show who can see a Post. Check out these little pictures (ignore the time stamp, it’s just there to clue in to where you will see these icons in FB):
Friends
Public
Friends of Friends **
So if you see that something is marked as Friends, you won’t be able to share it directly from Facebook and have your Friends actually see it. (Hi Mom!) If it’s a link, click through to the site and post to Facebook from there.
**Whoa, how do you post to Friends of Friends!?
I just started using “Friends of Friends” for things I don’t mind being a bit more Public that just “Friends.” It’s not obvious how to do this, so here are the steps:
As you are posting, click the button next to Post, select More, then See All, then Custom
Then start typing in the box “Friends of friends” and it will look like this:
Select “Friends of friends” and Save Changes.
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Now let’s look at a different topic that has been affecting several of my friends, mainly female ones.
Fake Friends
You get a friend request and don’t recognize the person. The vast majority of the time, you should absolutely not friend these strangers. In fact, you may even want to take the extra step of blocking them. Why? They could be scammers trying to get personal information. They could be trolls wanting to harass you. Some extra reasons to be suspicious:
- You have no mutual friends
- There’s a disconnect with the profile picture vs the person’s page, for example, the profile picture looks like a stock photo of a female model but the page appears to be a man’s
- The person’s page contains extremist language or hateful memes
- They’ve been on Facebook less than a year and have posted very little
- Their profile pictures all look like stock models
- They’ve combined attempting to friend you with a private message containing poor grammar and misspelled words
- They appear to have a set up a page for the sole purpose of selling something