Saying It Social

How to Set Your Facebook Privacy Settings If You Don’t Want Your Personal Profile Searchable

Why would you want to do this? Because you have to create a personal profile in order to create a page, thus forcing people to create profiles that have no intention or desire in managing them. To avoid having people requesting to be your friend with the result of being ignored making you look like a jerk, it is advisable to set your privacy settings so that the profile cannot be searched out or inadvertently stumbled upon. Another reason why people are setting up profiles that they don’t wish to use is so that they can create and be an administrator of a business page without forever being linked to that page (see 7.06.10 update). While it may seem as if creating profiles that aren’t used would skew Facebook’s numbers (because it does), Facebook leaves us no choice when they don’t give you the option to remove yourself as an admin from a page you create and they make you create a profile before you can create a page. (Makes you wonder how many of there 400 million users are really “users” doesn’t it??)

Due to the fact that Facebook has recently reconfigured their privacy settings area – here is the most up to date way to make sure the personal profile that you wish to be on “lock down” is in fact not able to be found.

1. In the upper right hand corner click on Account>Privacy Settings.

2. Under Basic Directory Information click on View Settings.

3. Presuming you haven’t added any friends, setting all of these settings to “Friends Only” (with the exception of “Send me friend requests” which doesn’t have a “Friends Only” option) means that no one will be able to do these things.

4. Go back to Privacy Settings and at the bottom under Applications and Websites click on Edit your settings.

5. At the bottom in the Public search section click on Edit Settings.

6. Make sure the “Enable public search” box is UNchecked.

That’s it. You’re done. Now you have a “secret” personal profile with which you can use to log in to access your business page.

UPDATE 7.06.10: Facebook now lets administrators remove themselves from pages – even if they were the initial creator. All you need to do is click on “Edit Page” under the picture of your page and there will be a box on the right side of the next page that has the list of Admins. Just click “Remove Admin” next to your name to remove your personal profile’s connection to the page.

June 3, 2010 - Posted by AK Stout | Facebook, Social Media Marketing, Social Networking | Facebook, facebook account settings, facebook personal profile, facebook privacy settings