Thursday, September 19, 2013

We're all writers so read this before sharing on Facebook (or anywhere else)

This is something of a public service announcement. If you use Facebook, please invest a little bit of time into understanding the basic functionality of its privacy settings. Also set aside a few minutes every couple of weeks to review them, as they change frequently and frankly, you may not fully understand that by clicking on something, you can change your own settings quite unintentionally.

For example, I have changed my own posting/privacy settings multiple times and for various reasons (some I understand, others not so much) they have changed back, or changed again.

Here's an example: it's extremely easy to set your status-posting setting to "private" - which means, of course, it's not private at all, but shared with all your friends.  It's also very easy to change your status setting to "public," which means it's really public, out there for anyone to see, like, forever, or until you delete it.

Ok. Those of you who are Facebook gurus know exactly how these things work. And you can still make mistakes.

What's worse, a disturbing lot of you are thinking, well, I don't use Facebook enough to worry about all that or I don't have time to mess around with all those settings and to you I say, yes you do.

If you use Facebook at all then you should learn how to use the privacy settings to your advantage, and be vigilant about understanding the changes. And there are always changes!

It doesn't take that long to learn the ropes, and Facebook has helpful "help" pages that explain things well. Use them. Don't take the advice of post-of-a-repost on one of your friend's friends' walls. Go directly to the current Facebook help page and learn how to do it.

I manage Facebook pages for nearly a dozen businesses and organizations (and my own book!! < that's a plug) and I assure you that if I can screw up a "simple" privacy setting, you can too. Shame on all of us who don't take the time to learn how to use them properly.

Lecture over! Class dismissed! Thanks for reading!

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