How to Get Your Facebook Account Under Control

Facebook is fun. This much everyone knows. But much like entering any territory, the more you know about Facebook and the more options you have available to you, the greater the pleasure. We don’t mean to scare you off with too much information. There are plenty of features on Facebook, you can really live without knowing. However some features you may not know about can take only 2 minutes to learn and will make life a lot easier, and more fun. This includes privacy settings as well, which are important to know for keeping your mind at ease while you do your thing.

Some Facebook fun-facts:

• Facebook hit 901 million monthly active users back in April, according to the company (with numbers dwindling up and down a bit since, the 1 billion mark is very near). Every day, those masses of usersare uploading 300 million photos and making 3.2 billion likes and comments online.

• Once Facebook hits the one billion mark, it will have a user base almost equal to the population of the entire continent of Africa. Current estimates put the number of people in Africa at 1.03 billion.

• A December 2011 report by Nielsen said the average Facebook user in the U.S. spends nearly 7 hours a month on the social network.

• About 20 percent of all photos taken this year will end up on Facebook. Facebook’s library already has 140 billion photos, which is 10,000 times that of the Library of Congress and 4 percent of all the photos ever taken.

Get your privacy settings under control

Our friends are grouped together in our minds. Different sets of people in our lives are divided into different social circles. And we don’t always communicate the same stories and information with all our friends and acquaintances. Mom shouldn’t necessarily see the same status as our college friends, and there are definite updates we do not want our boss to see. Facebook allows you to organize your friends into different groups, which can later be used to determine who sees what.

To do this, go to https://www.facebook.com/bookmarks/lists . You’ll find Facebook has already organized names of smart lists according to Timeline information you’ve put in, like your work place or the high school you went to. You can manage a list by adding or removing people from it, or you can create a custom list by clicking the + “Create List” button.

>> Check out more Facebook tricks

Select who sees what you post

Facebook lets you to control who can see what you post per individual status update. With each photo or information you share, you can click the arrow next to “Post” to see the drop down menu with different options like “public, friends, friends of friends,” or any one of your pre-created lists. You can also select “Custom” and choose particular people to hide the status from. There must be some information your aunt can live without knowing.

How to Get Your Facebook Account Under Control- Lists

Choose who sees your friends

Did you know you can choose who can see your friends and who can’t?
This is a tweak that was added to Facebook some time ago and it’s useful in instances where you prefer to show your connections to some people and not expose them to others. From your Timeline, go to “Friends”, then click “Edit” and select from the drop down menu.

Who sees your friends

Facebook’s tricky email update- did you know about your new address?

Facebook recently did a massive update and replaced everyone’s email address with a @facebook.com address. This “trick” raised much controversy over the past two weeks, since no one was informed about it ahead of time.

Well, there’s a way to mend it. If you’re like many people, already juggling several email addresses and not interested in using another, worry not. Take control and change it back to your preferred email. To do this, click on “About” in your Timeline, then go to Contact Info and click Edit. You can choose which email address will be the default (one shown on your Timeline) or which emails to delete altogether.

Facebook fun features

Timeline gives lots of cool and fun features, if you haven’t yet explored all of them yet, here are a few to start you out with.
Activity Log
The “Activity Log” allows you to review, approve or hide posts to your wall all the way back to when you first joined Facebook. This feature is only visible to you and you can scan it just for fun or to actually edit some information. It’s a nice walk down memory lane, who knows what you’ll find!
View As
Ever wondered what your Timeline looks like to others? You can easily switch to external view and see if there’s anything you’d like to tweak in your Timeline’s appearance. Click on the gear next to Activity Log and select “View As”.
MapThis feature enables viewers to see all the places they have previously checked in. The map is a cool display of where you have been, and also keeps count of how many times you have visited the same place. It shows all kinds of location-based information including where you’ve lived, trips you’ve taken, where important events or moments in your life happened (if you add them to Facebook), and photos with a tagged location. If you’re not accustomed to location tagging, click on the Map in your Timeline and use the slider that appears above the images to scroll through your photos. To add a location, just click on a photo and type the photo’s location into the drop-down box.