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Adjust Default Privacy Settings, Facebook, Hide Facebook Likes, Hide Likes from Timeline, Layered Privacy

The Ultimate Facebook Like Guide – Part Two

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Our last post detailed how to hide or unhide your Facebook Likes ‘box’. Here’s that post: Part One of the Ultimate Facebook Likes Guide  In that post, we showed you how to control the privacy of each like. Since that part is a bit confusing, here’s a guide to the whole ‘Like’ section.

Before we begin, some explanation is required. The ‘likes’ we are talking about here are those that pertain to your interests, things such as Music, Television, Books, etc. None of this applies to photos or comments that you click ‘like’ on. As you know, those ‘likes’ are controlled by the owner’s privacy settings, not yours. Are we clear on that? If you like Ally’s photo, only Ally controls who sees either the photo or the fact that you like it. The only way to hide your ‘like’ is to ‘unlike’ it. Same goes for your comments, your liking a comment, etc. You control things that you post. You do not control anything that you do not post.

Second point: Some things, such as Music and Film, can only be hidden or shown as a group. If you like the Beatles and want to show everyone that you do, you can show them ALL of the music you like. If you like the Backstreet Boys and DO NOT want anyone to know that, you have to hide ALL of the music that you like. If you’ve got your main section settings set to ‘Friends’ or ‘Public’, and you happen to add Britney Spears to your Music likes, everyone will know. The ONLY way you can hide it is to remove poor old Britney from your list or hide the whole section.

Let’s get started. From your Timeline, click on Update Info. The rest of this post flows down from the top to the bottom of the page that comes up next after you click Update Info.

Photo of Ultimate Guide 1
Hide everything by clicking the Edit icon and selecting Hide Section.

 

Working down from the top, let’s see what you can hide and what you can’t.

1. About – You can hide different parts of your information. Click the Edit icon in each section to see what you can hide.

2. TV programmes – It’s all or one for this. Show everything or hide everything.

3. Books – All or none.

4. Films – All or none

5. Music – All or none.

6. Music – All or none.

7. Friends – Show all or hide all EXCEPT for mutual friends. If you have a mutual friend with someone, you can’t hide that.

8. Photos – You have complete control of all of your photos EXCEPT your Timeline cover photos. Please remember that you can’t hide your cover photos. We said that twice simply to emphasize it. If you have a questionable cover photo, everyone who sees your Facebook profile, even if they are not friends of yours, can see it.

9. Games (Recent Games, actually) – All or none.

10. Places – All or none.

That’s it for the sections of your ‘likes’ or your favorites. (Maybe everyone should start to use the term favorites instead of likes. It gets confusing otherwise, right? Read on….)

OK, now we are into the last section of these favorites. Conveniently, Facebook has named them Likes! The final section is divided up into these categories:

Other Likes, Inspirational People, Sports, Sports Teams, Athletes, Games, Activities and Interests. 

In previous posts, we’ve used the term ‘page likes’ for these items. Until recently, you could hide some of your individual likes but now it’s different. For better or worse, you only get to show or hide ALL of each category.  Click on any of the topics at the top of your Likes section. Most of them would probably be under the heading ‘Other Likes’, at least they were for us. Now you don’t have to worry about hiding some but showing others. It’s easy to hide them all. Click the edit icon on the right side and choose Edit Privacy. Here’s what you see:

Photo of Ultimate Guide 2
Choose your privacy settings here.

 

If a Facebook page doesn’t fall into one of the main categories, it will be placed under ‘Other Likes’. Keep that in mind. As you scan your individual likes, you’ll see a sub-heading under the name. Some may be Theatre or Travel Agency or something completely different. Weixin, for instance, is listed as an ‘Interest’ under ‘Activities’. Weixin or WeChat really isn’t an activity, it’s a bit of software.  Somehow it’s shown as an interest. Go figure.

We mention this because you may decide to show your ‘like’ of Inspirational People. Well, if you look at the list of inspirational people, you may be quite surprised at who Facebook deems ‘influential’. You may be expecting Mother Theresa but Charlize Theron shows up in the suggestion box. If you’ve chosen to Like Theron and expect her to show up under ‘Other Likes’ that you’ve hidden, you’d be surprised to find out that she’s in the Inspirational People section that you’ve chosen to show. See what we mean?

TIP: Facebook uses your Likes and Interests (Favorites) to tune the ads that you see on your pages. If you like Guitars, you will see Guitar ads. It’s that simple. Choosing a certain genre of movie or a certain type of music will almost certainly put you into an age demographic that Facebook will mine for ads that you just might click on. If do, they make money. Keep that in mind when you’re blithely ‘liking’ things that you see on Facebook.

There’s more to this than meets the eye, isn’t there? In our next post we’re going to get into these likes in more detail. Now you know what you can hide and what you can’t, we’ll work on some deeper concepts next time.

Thanks for reading!

 

 

 

 

 

Controlled sharing, Facebook, Facebook page likes, Facebook Secrets, Facebook Tricks, Hide Likes from Timeline, Timeline

Facebook Likes – The Ultimate Guide – Part Four

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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:

Photo of Like editing page
See the word Edit up on the top right? Click it.

The next page, after you click the Edit button, looks like this:

 

Photo of Editing your Likes 2
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:

Photo of Favorite share 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:

Photo of perfect privacy 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!

 

 

 

 

Controlled sharing, Facebook, Facebook Secrets, Facebook Tricks, Hide Likes from Timeline

Facebook Likes – The Ultimate Guide – Part Three

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To review, we know now that you can’t hide likes or comments on someone else’s post, no matter what kind of post or share it is. Next, lets take care of our ‘likes’, those  bits of personal information that Facebook feels are vitally important to share with your friends. They are contained in one of those little boxes under your cover photo. You can choose to show whatever boxes you want in that row that Facebook has termed ‘Favorites’. There are a total of eight possibilities for your Favorite boxes.

Not to confuse the issue even more, Facebook has two concepts of ‘Favorites’. The first has to do with which boxes you choose to show to the right of your profile photo. The ones across the top row are your ‘favorite’ boxes. The other boxes, if there are any, are available by clicking the little arrow on the far right of the row.

The second kind of favorite is used to describe your ‘favorite’ likes such as your favorite movie, your favorite TV show and so on.

The Boxes: 

The boxes to the right of your profile photo could show one of eight things. All boxes are links to whatever one of those eight things you decide to put up there. The eight things could be a link to your friend list, your photos, your likes, your notes, your subscribers (if you have chosen to allow subscribers), your maps, etc. It has occurred to us that there may be more than eight boxes available or your choices may very. Everyone’s Facebook timeline might be a little different.

The bare minimum seems to be two boxes, those being friends and photos. Even if you hide your friend list from everyone, there will be a box that shows any mutual friends that you and the viewer have. Here is a shot of the skimpiest timeline you’ll ever see:

Photo of a streamlined Facebook timeline
Only two boxes, one of mutual friends and one linked to photos.

This is the least amount of information that Facebook allows you to show on your timeline. The Like box is gone, as are the rest of them. Let’s add the Like box back and see what we can do with it:

Photo of adding boxes
Two boxes are standard, click on a + sign to add more.

 

If you click on the + sign on the top row, remember that they are termed ‘favorites’ by Facebook, you will get a different menu than if you click on one of the bottom boxes. Here’s what you see on the top:

Photo of top box menu
Everything seems to be here but ‘Likes’.

No Like box yet. Click on one of the bottom boxes to bring up this menu:

Photo of bottom row of boxes
Likes is there. Click the words Likes to add that box to the bottom row.

 

Seeing as how we only have two boxes on the top row, Facebook automatically adds your new ‘Likes’ box to the top row when you refresh the page. If you had a full row of boxes on the top, you’d be able to choose which ones you want to make your ‘favorites’. Hover your cursor (mouse) on the top right of the Like box and this menu will pop out:

Photo of swap box
‘Swap position with’ means you can arrange the favorite boxes as you wish.

 

Right now, we can only swap our Like box with Gamer Friends since we have removed all of the other box choices from our favorites.

 

Next time we’ll get deeper into sorting out our likes. This is enough information for this post. Play around with these settings until they are second nature to you.

 

Thanks for reading!