Facebook Lists for Categorizing Your Friends

If you’re like most people, your Facebook friends are a group of people that are connected to your life in very different ways. Some might be members of your immediate family, some might be more distant relatives. Then there are those who might be: neighbors, work associates, high school friends, people in your bowling league, etc. Facebook Lists is a feature that allows you to segment your Facebook friends in a way that gives you more control over your reading, posting, and sharing.

Here’s the idea. Suppose you want to make a post about something happening in your hometown, but you’d prefer if it didn’t show to friends and relatives who live in other places (since they would probably not attend). You could make the post viewable to only the list of your friends that live locally. Or perhaps you want to make an announcement that would only be relevant to family members. You could then make a post for a list of family members only. This not only applies to your own posts but could also apply to posts by other people and pages that you want to share. You can choose to share with a list, rather than all of your Facebook friends.

Besides the benefit of posting and sharing to a select group of your friends, you can also choose to read posts in a News Feed of only the friends from a certain list. For example, “Close Friends” is a list created for you automatically by Facebook. You might sometimes wish to only see a News Feed that includes posts from that list.

The three lists Facebook creates for you automatically are:

• Close Friends
• Acquaintances (people you might want to include less often)
• Restricted (people who you normally don’t want to see your personal posts)

The Restricted List
It’s amazing how many useful and interesting features Facebook has that are not widely known about. One that can be extremely handy for those looking for better separation between their personal and work lives is called the Restricted List.

Case in point: Let’s say you have a client or customer that you consider important for your business but is not someone with whom you want to share personal photos and information. Or, perhaps your colleagues at work, or even your boss, wants to be your personal friend on Facebook? Getting friend requests can sometimes be awkward. There are times when we might not want to open up our personal lives to those in our career or business world. That’s why Facebook create the Restricted List.

Facebook Lists is a handy feature that lets users segment their friends into groups. These groups can be whatever you want them to be, such as your high school classmates, your golf buddies, or your nieces and nephews. You can create and name them as you please. The Restricted List, however, is created by default in Facebook. You need only add people to it.

So, in the case of an uncomfortable friend request, you can simply accept the request and then immediately add that person to your Restricted List. That person will then not be able to see your posts UNLESS you tag them, or you set the post to be publicly viewable.

To create and manage friends lists on Facebook, go to your Home screen, then click “Friends” in the left menu, then select “Custom Lists.”