Billions of people use social media every single day, but if you have never used it before, how do you know what sites to sign up too? It doesn’t matter whether you want to set up your first social media account or simply one for a family friend. Knowing the privacy settings is vital if you want to keep your personal life off the internet.
Facebook is one of the largest social media sites on the internet. You can like other peoples posts, share their content and even invite them to like pages. The great thing about Facebook is the privacy settings. You can set your Facebook so that only people who are on your friends lists will see your posts. This is beneficial if you are using Facebook as a sole user, but if you want to start up a page, you don’t have as much control. Pages however are great for businesses, as they are very open to join and very easy to use. If you want to limit what people can see on your page, then you should think about creating a group. This way, only people you approve can join your group and see your content; this is very beneficial to groups such as high school sports teams and small friendly gatherings.
Twitter also has some privacy settings available; however this is somewhat limited when compared to other social media websites. In Twitter, you can control who you accept as a follower by adjusting your privacy settings. You can manually approve whoever you want to connect with, which in turn, means that only people who you connect with can see your tweets. This doesn’t limit you from seeing other people’s tweets however, but it does mean that you can protect your personal account. If you own a company page, you would want to keep your page public, because a private page can discourage connections, something you want to avoid if you are trying to get publicity.
When your LinkedIn profile shows up in Google, how much of it can other people see without having to log into their own LinkedIn? By default, any visitor has access to your entire profile. This includes everything from your summary to your current positions, your education and even your website and groups. LinkedIn allows you to go to your profiles section, and set the pieces of information that you don’t want to be publicly displayed, a great feature for those who want a little more private profile. You will also find that LinkedIn has a network update section, so when you make an announcement it can be seen by your connections. LinkedIn gives you four options here, your posts can be seen by everyone, people in your network, only your direct connections or nobody at all. This is very useful if you are trying to target a specific audience, not to mention that it also means that you can offer job opportunities to your direct audience and not your second or third connections.