Posting an update to Facebook doesn't have to mean sharing your life with every single person you've befriended there. In fact, all of the major social apps give you more granular control than you might realise.
If you want to set up a private, select group of people to show off photos of your familt pictures to or to keep your most wild nights out a secret from you can do so without resorting to emails or group chats.
We'll show you how to lock down your Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts below, but a word of warning: There's nothing to stop someone in your private circles taking a screenshot of what you've shared and making it public. So even with your settings dialed in, be careful what you share, and who share with.
Facebook has a long history of privacy failures, but at least it provides ample tools for restricting the audience of your posts. Start to write an update on the web, and you'll notice drop-down menus next to both News Feed and Your Story, the two places where your post can appear.
These menus probably say Friends by default, but if you open them up, you can be more selective about who will see your post. You can even make it public, if you want, visible by anyone on the web, even if they're not one of your confirmed friends on Facebook.
Click More then See All on the drop-down menu, and Facebook lets you set up a list of specific friends who can see the post—just your relatives, for example, or the people who work in your office. You can also opt for Friends except, which includes all of your Facebook friends apart from whomever you exclude, or Specific friends, which limits distribution to a smaller list of your choosing.
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It's important to remember that the audience you select because the default for any subsequent posts, until you change it back again. Unless you change the audience for your posts back to Friends, for instance, any posts you publish on Facebook will only be visible to the custom list of people you've just created.
These same options are available in the Facebook apps for Android and iOS, and just about anywhere you can post to Facebook from. Again, you'll see a drop-down menu—most probably set to Friends, as that's the default—and again you can tap on it to change the audience for a post. Not everyone in your Facebook network needs to see your next speed-eating challenge, you know?
Tweeting is much more straightforward than posting on Facebook. There's no granularity to it; your account is either public, meaning anyone on the web can see your posts, or private, which limits the audience to followers you've specifically approved.
On the flip side, if your account is private and then goes public, your entire timeline becomes visible to the world, unless you delete specific tweets in advance. There's no option on Twitter to keep some tweets private and leave others public. Your account as a whole is either one or the other.The process is the same in the Twitter mobile apps: Open up the Settings page, then choose Privacy and safety and Protect your Tweets. Of course there's always the option to create two Twitter accounts—one private and one public—and then keep jumping between them, but you might not feel as though it's worth the extra effort.
Applies a mix of the approaches used by Twitter and Facebook when it comes to setting the visibility of your posts. Like Twitter, accounts can be public—viewed by anyone, even those without an Instagram account—or private, visible only to people who follow you.To make your Instagram private, go to your settings page on the web and select Private account. If you're in the mobile app, the same option can be found under Privacy and Account privacy from the Settings page.As on Twitter, if you go from public to private, all your previous posts get hidden from the public at large, your current followers are all approved en masse, and you have to give the thumbs up to any follower requests from then on. If you go from private to public, all your past posts then become available to anyone.
Please be safe whilst your browsing, I hope this advice will help you to control your social media to a level that suits you and at least now you are more aware of the available options.
