Have you ever wished you could choose exactly who sees your Facebook posts? Most people know you can choose whether each post is public or visible only to friends – but it’s possible to go a step further and dictate exactly which groups of friends can see it.
The easiest way to do this is to manually pick out those you don’t want to see your post. Tap the Privacy button when creating a new post in Facebook and choose Friends except…, then tap anyone who you’d rather didn’t see your next status update.
Simple, but not exactly efficient – you’ll have to do this every time you post, and it can get unwieldy to keep track of names if you have a lot of friends on the network.
A much better solution is to create reusable “friends lists” for distinct groups. That way you can tell Facebook that you want a post to only show up for your movie buddies, your college pals, or your workmates. No boundaries crossed and no embarrassing drinking stories accessible to your great aunt or your line manager.
The only problem is that Facebook doesn’t make it easy to create friends lists. In fact, it’s not possible at all from an iPhone, regardless of whether you access Facebook from the official app or through Safari. Instead, you’ll need to log on from a computer, or via Safari on an iPad. Don’t worry, once the setup is done you’ll be able to use this feature from an iPhone – you’ll only need the other device to create the list in the first place.
Once you’ve logged in on the right device, from your main news feed have a look for the Friends Lists button on the Explore menu to the left of the website. You might have to click See More to find it.
Here, you can simply press Create List, give it a name, and type the names of anyone you’d like to add. When you’re finished, hit Create and the list will be saved.
The next time you go to post a status update or a photo album, you’ll see a new option under the familiar Privacy section. Choose the list you created to ensure your post only shows up in the news feeds of those selected. Voilà!