Using lists to split your content - Facebook Tutorial

- If you don't want to go through and set up separate accounts another technique you can use are lists. Lists allow you to target who sees particular content. A list can be extremely specific. One person can be on a list maybe it's just your household or your relatives. Facebook allows you to create custom lists and will also build some automatically based upon job history. With lists there are a lot of benefits. First up, friends can't really tell if they're on a list very easily. So if there are people you don't want to see particular content, maybe coworkers you can easily add them to a list and choose to exclude some of the activities that you post. Now keep in mind, sometimes you'll make a mistake and forget to choose the right list or maybe somebody sees something and screenshots it or shows their device to someone else. So lists are not absolute privacy but they do give you refined controls. All right, let's take a look at what this might be. Your network is comprised of many different individuals. Some are family, some are friends others may be professional connections. With lists what we can do is make sure that people only see the content that we've specified. We can also control what's displayed on the timeline itself. What gets seen and by who. This can be done for a specific post as well and it also limits what you see. So you can choose to filter based upon a certain view. For example, if I come here and go to my page, I can start to view what's happening. If I come here to friends, you see that we have different lists. People that were recently added, for example, people who have birthdays coming up, people that I worked with in the past or currently and if we click more, you see that there are a few other lists available. There are two lists that are automatically built that are very important and you need to know how to use them. The first list is called acquaintances. I suggest you put clients on here people that you want to interact with but not necessarily have a personal relationship with. People on your acquaintances list will rarely show up in your newsfeed so you're not constantly seeing updates from people that you're not that interested in but you still want to be able to connect from time to time. You can also choose to exclude these people when you post something. This way if it's a business connection, you don't have to worry about seeing all of their content all the time as well as having them see all of your stuff that may not be appropriate. You could choose friends except acquaintances in the audience selector and it's a great way to quickly filter out your post. If you need adjust this and assign somebody to a list simply navigate to their page and then choose the edit friends list. You'll now see a pop-up and you can decide what list they are on. Acquaintances is a good way to filter things out. People that you want to stay connected to but not necessarily all of them time. The other list to know about is the restricted list. This is for people that you've added as a friend but you don't want to share with. Now, you might be thinking why would you add them as a friend if you don't actually want them to see stuff but sometimes this happens. Maybe your boss reached out to you on Facebook and asked to be your friend, or maybe it's somebody you went to school with, or you're connected to professionally but you don't actually want to engage. By putting them on the restricted list they're not going to see most of your content. This is good for new clients or bosses and it allows them to only see the content that you've set to public. Now, this is useful and you can still tag them in a post. So if it's a public post or one that you've tagged them, they'll see it. Otherwise they can't see your content. They can still message you, but they can't poke around and look at all the stuff you've done. Now, let's go back here to post. You'll notice for example, this morning I shared about this morning's workout. This is a way that I remind myself to stay physically fit and it's sometimes pops back up in my timeline of Facebook showing me a snapshot of my health or fitness. I've often had ups or downs and I try very hard to stay physically active. Well, this is not something I choose to share with the world so I've set the privacy to just my friends. Maybe though I want to post something and limit it to a smaller group. So you'll see when I create the post that I could see those same list. For example, I could choose specific people to see things or closer group of friends and collaborators or my immediate family. This list will then limit it so that only family members would see this post. Now, you have to keep in mind that these lists are sometimes auto-generated like family goes by people that you've listed under your profile, but you can also manually add people. If you go to your friends list and you realize that someone's not on a correct list, you can click here and see what lists they're added to. Just click edit friend list and you can now decide where they belong. For example, this is my mom so I consider her both a close friend and a family member. And so I want to make sure that when I share this information, she's going to see it. However, we didn't go to high school together nor did we work together so I might want to control what she's able to view. Here's my friend Vanelli and if I take a look at his settings here under the friend list, you'll see that I consider him a close friend and a friend and we've worked together business-wise so this will affect what he can see. This way, I can decide who gets targeted when a post is made and it's a great way to control who's allowed to see specific posts. Additionally, lists are a great way to filter your own view so you can more quickly see what's important to you given the task at hand. What you'll want to do is go to your homepage and then click see more. You'll now see a category called friends list. Clicking this will allow you to view the list that you have. Here, you can create new lists very easily. So if you want to create a new list for a particular job, just click create list. For example, I can make a list called red pixel and then start to add members. People that I've worked with that I want to connect with. Notice how it scans through your friends library pretty quickly and makes it easy to find those folks. Now you can create a list so you can easily stay connected and just click create. Additionally, that list can be used to filter the view. So here I'm seeing a custom list and I'm seeing recent posts from people on that list. If I go back and choose that list as a whole again, I can now go and just see information from people that I consider business colleagues. Now it's filtered the view and I'm seeing updates from people that I have a professional relationship with making it easier to stay connected. Now, this doesn't mean that I may not just see personal posts from them, but it does allow me to apply some filters so I can narrow it down who I want to stay connected with. Lists are a great tool overall whether you want to use them to control who sees your stuff or what content you see on Facebook and it lets you greatly override the algorithm that sometimes auto controls what information you're shown.