If you need to take a refreshing break from Facebook, here’s how to do it. Facebook makes it easy to deactivate your account and just as easy to reactivate it. Everything stays the same, it’s just that you are temporarily and almost completely gone from Facebook. Here is how Facebook’s help section describes it:
Just a few easy steps and you’re free!
1. Account Settings:
Click to the right of Home and choose Account Settings.
2. Click on Security:
Security. One of the menus we don’t use very much.
3. Are you sure? Facebook comes up with this prompt to make sure you know what you’re doing. Read the help menu above to see exactly what this all means:
Read the fine print and remember that you can always change your mind.
That’s pretty much it. You take a break and do your stuff, then come back to Facebook when you’re refreshed and ready. Parts of your information will still be visible but your activities won’t be. Consider it a long nap, OK?
If Facebook had its way, we would have no walls on our houses and we’d all be wearing ID chips to show our current location. If you think this idea is something from science fiction, think again. Right now, many of you are telling Facebook and Twitter and Foursquare and WeChat(Weixin) and other social networking sites exactly where you are. Here’s some what-ifs for you.
1. What if you had a stalker, someone from work or school or your neighborhood, who really wanted to get closer to you? How would he or she do that? Well, getting you to add him or her was a friend on Facebook would be a start. Do you know all of your friends? Do you know if they are really who they say they are? Chances are, if you connect to social networking through your mobile device or tablet, you’re opening yourself up to this kind of sketchy activity.
2. Do you drive a fancy car, say a Mercedes or BMW? To most people, driving a fancy car is a status symbol. That’s easy to figure out, isn’t it? Let’s say that some burglar is looking for a nice score in your neighborhood. Let’s say they figure out your name and address. With a bit of work, they could track you on some social networking site and know when you are not at home. That’s a lot easier than your might think. Even if you are just out shopping, maybe across town or in the next city, and you connect to one of your social networking sites through your phone, you are most likely telling that burglar exactly where you are and approximately how long it will be before you return home. You might as well leave a sign on your door, “Out for a bit, help yourself.”
3. You are applying for a job or an internship and someone wants to see what kind of person you are, aside from your resume or application. Maybe you’re in a bar, having a rousing good time and you tweet about it, maybe post some pics on Facebook, and maybe this bar you’re in just isn’t too classy. We’re thinking of somewhere that might have exotic dancers, mud- wrestling or midget tossing, you know? Sure, you are free to go to those places but do you really want future employers to know about it before they get to know the real you? Go ahead, tweet/post/comment from wherever you want but once you give any social media the ability to pinpoint your current location, you’re opening the door to this kind of snooping.
In this photo, Kevin is away for the weekend. We even know where he is. Can you see any danger in posting that information?
TIP: Get to know your mobile device or tablet. Figure out where you can turn your location settings off, or on, depending on your personal wishes. We’re not saying that telling others where you are is a bad thing, it’s just that sometimes it’s definitely not a good thing.
Here is a link that we found which describes real situations where location mapping caused problems. Check it out and, hopefully, this will reinforce out point:
If you have a business or you’re in a band and want to promote yourself on Facebook, use the Create a Page link on the main Facebook page to set up your business or band profile. Once you do that, you can use Facebook to increase business for yourself or awareness of your music. Here’s how you do it:
1. Sign out of Facebook if you are already signed in on your personal profile. Why? Because you may not want your public, business page associated with your personal page. It’s up to you but we think that it’s better to keep the two things separate.
2. At the bottom of the Facebook sign-in page you will see the Create a Page link. Here’s a photo of it:
Click on the ‘Create a Page’ link.
3. Once you click on the link, you’ll have to decide what type of page you want. Facebook offers you six choices and you have to somehow fit your ‘hot yoga/disco/senior’s home’ business into one of them. Here’s what you see when you click on the Create a Page link:
Click on one of the icons and the following drop-down menu will appear.
4. Next, you have to figure out which group of sites your business will fit in. Good luck with that. Here are some of the choices:
Scroll down the menu to see where your business might fit.
5. Next, Facebook takes you to a page where you fill in the normal email address, date of birth and so on. You also have to agree to their terms and prove that you’re not a bot by filling in the text box (captcha). This is what it looks like:
This is very straightforward. Use your company email or get a new free account at hotmail or gmail. Again, it might be better to separate your personal email from your business to avoid spam.
6. After this is all finished, proceed to your profile and fill it out as you see fit. Add photos, videos, customer success stories, whatever you think will increase your business. Just remember that people are now watching you and your business. Don’t alienate your customers or fans by doing something that you will regret later. You’ve been warned!
Questions, comments and praise are always welcome. Thanks for reading. Oh, here is our Facebook page:
Want to hide your friend list in Facebook? Here’s how:
1.
From any page on Facebook, head to Account Settings.
2.
On the left side, click on the blue ‘your Timeline’.
3.
To the right of your name, click on the down arrow to the right of ‘About’.
4.
Click on the word Friends.
5.
Click on the Edit button and this menu drops down.
6.
Choose ‘Only Me’ or whatever option you choose.
There are other ways to get to this menu but this is probably the quickest way. It’s up to you, of course, but we don’t know why your friend list should be public knowledge. You can share lots of things on Facebook but maybe you should think about whether to share your friends or not. Think about it. Sharing this is list is a big security hole. Knowing who your friends are is just another way of pretending to know you.
This post is strictly for your Likes, the ones that your Like box is linked to. Go to your Facebook timeline and click on the Like box. This is that page that will pop up:
See the word Edit up on the top right? Click it.
The next page, after you click the Edit button, looks like this:
This is where you choose what to show and what to hide.
This is a long page, starting with your Favorites. (The photo reads Favourites because we’re in Canada and use the British spelling.) Your page of Likes is made up of both your favorites as well as the pages you like. The pages are all at the bottom. Right now, let’s look at the Music box. You can do two things with each favorite. You can show it or hide it. If you decide to show it, you can choose who you want to see it or who you want to hide it from, the same as if you post a photo on Facebook.
Once you decide who you want to share this favorite box with, you’re left with showing them every type of music you like. You can’t break up this box into pieces, say Techno being one piece that you don’t mind showing and Andy Williams being another piece that you don’t want to show. If you show your music to anyone, they see all of the music you like. If you want to hide old Andy, you have to hit the X beside their name to delete it.
The same applies to all of the topics that Facebook thinks should be listed as Favorites, whether they be books, TV, movies or whatever. If you want to hide your Favorites from someone or only show them to a group of friends, click on the icon on the right. That will bring up this menu:
Sort out this menu as best you can. This applies to the particular favorite you are working on, not every single one of them.
You can see from the photo above that you can hide a particular favorite from some people but you can’t hide only one of those individual items unless you hide the whole group of favorites. Get it? If you like Madonna in your Music favorites and you show your Music favorites to your friends, you can’t hide the fact that Madonna is in that group.
Useless Favorites Tip: These favorites are really useless in the whole scheme of things to share on Facebook. The only reason they are even on your timeline is to open yourself up a bit to your friends. You may have an acquaintance who knows a bit about you but they didn’t know that you like Bladerunner (a movie). Once they find out that you like something, they have a fuller picture of you as a person and, possibly, might feel better about chatting with you about similar interests. Having a favorite in this group doesn’t mean that you’ll get inundated with offers or emails or updates on anything. These favorites are just there in order for people to get to know you better. Hide them, show them, it doesn’t matter.
Let’s move on to items that actually get updated every now and then, Facebook pages. As you know, Facebook pages are full of information, updates as well as photos and links, all pertaining to the person or company that created the page. Virtually every star, celebrity or company has a Facebook page. If they don’t, they’re missing the boat.
Facebook Page Likes – Options Available
As far as Facebook page likes go, you can hide them or show them as a group. Yes, you can show or hide them all to whatever group of friends you choose but you cannot hide one of the pages and show the others. This is the same as your other favorites, it’s all or nothing. All means every page you like will be shown to whoever you show any page you like. You can’t pick and choose what to show.
If you like a page, only you will see the updates and information that this page feeds out. No one else will see anything that a page feeds out to you unless they follow the same page.
TIP: There is no reason to show anyone what pages you like. Why not hide all of the pages you like? That way you won’t slip up. Close friends, relatives, employers and employees don’t have to know what pages you follow, do they? Instead of tripping up at some point as you try to keep track of who can see what, why not just shut out everyone? Makes sense to us. Once you lock your page likes from everyone, you are free to be yourself. We advise you to set your Page Likes to this setting:
Set this page to ‘Only me’ and feel free to ‘like’ any page you bloody well want to! Yay freedom!
We’re done. Over the last few posts we’ve tried to sort out everything about Facebook like boxes, Facebook likes and, finally, Facebook page likes. We hope things are a bit clearer now for you. Questions, comments, all are welcome. Good luck!
Thanks for reading!
a little bit of hi-tech, a little bit of common sense and a lot of fun
