Tweak your Facebook lists to filter your freaky friends

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We’ve all got them: the freaky friends. Those who comment on and like every. single. status update.

Those who post long, ranting political polemics to your happy cat poster images. The friends that creep you out in a subtle, yet plausibly deniable way.

Or maybe there’s the friends you want to get your freak on with who really don’t need to see you in those embarrassing photo updates that you send to your frat brothers.

However you rank your friends, Facebook has some non-intuitive list tools to help you finely tune your groups of friends. Here’s how to use them, and then how to view your profile through the lens of any specific person on your friends list, to make sure your list tweak was effective.

friends list

Head into your Facebook profile and click on the Friends button. Your Facebook buddies will display in a two column grid down the page, each with a little box next to their name that has the name of the current list they’re on.

Click on that box and you’ll get a contextual menu with “Add to another list…” option. Click on that and then either click on a list that you’ve already created, or scroll way to the bottom of the menu and choose “New List…”

You can sort all of your Facebook friends into any lists you like, and then use those lists when posting by hitting the privacy button in the lower right of your status update box. You can choose which list to post the status update to, thereby passing up all the other lists.

posting lists

If you hit the Custom option in that privacy status menu, you’ll be able to exclude specific lists, as well, so you can post to all of your Facebook friends, except a list containing, say, all the upper executive team at work.

View As

Finally, if you want to see what your Facebook timeline looks like to a specific person (who might be on a list you don’t want seeing certain things, as above), you can head to their Facebook profile and then click on the little ellipsis button to the far right bottom corner of your buddy’s profile image.

specific person

Click on View As… and then a little black bar will drop down. You can then view your profile as the Public can, or click on View as Specific Person and type in a friend’s name. You’ll then see your profile, along with all your status updates that the person can see on your Timeline. If you see that freaky selfie you only wanted your best friends to see, then maybe you added it wrong.

Via: Forbes

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