Tips for Minimizing Facebook Timeline Embarrassment

December 20, 2011 - Posted by Amy Rose Brown  

There’s been buzz about the Facebook Timeline profile since September, but it was only available to developers until last week. The Timeline shows a detailed overview of everything you’ve ever done on Facebook. Depending on how you’ve previously used Facebook, this concept falls somewhere on a spectrum between “awesome” and “terrifying”. Now that the major redesign is available to all Facebook users, we’ve compiled some basic information to help make your transition easier – and to keep you from accidentally embarrassing yourself.

1. How to fill in your Timeline

You’ll notice that along with updating your status, adding a photo, or checking into a place, there’s a new menu option: adding a life event. You can add life events to fill in the gaps on your Timeline, if you wish.

These life events are divided into five categories. Under these five categories, you’ll see some familiar options: new relationships, work, school, birth of a child. There are also some options that range from learning your first word to meeting your significant other to losing weight. Keep in mind that the default privacy setting for all your life events is public, so make sure to change it if you don’t want the whole world to know when you had your first kiss (that’s an option too).

2. How to view your Timeline as someone else

Since the Timeline profile makes it easier for people to scroll back through your entire history on Facebook, you may want to see how you would look if certain people decided to peruse the information you thought was buried forever. People like your boss. Or your parents. Luckily, you can check to see how your profile looks to these people.

On the top right side of your profile, just across from your profile picture, there’s a dropdown menu with a “view as…” option.

Type any friend’s name in the box provided and then scroll through your Timeline to see yourself from their vantage point. You may then find yourself needing our next tip.

3. How to hide stories on your Timeline

For my example, I’m using photos from when my hair and I were going through a strange phase together that I’d just rather forget. I don’t want to delete the photos, but I don’t want anybody else to be able to see them. Under the pencil dropdown menu in the top right corner of all your stories, there’s an option to hide them from your Timeline. You’ll still be able to see the activity, but other people will have no idea about that haircut.

4. How to feature (or un-feature) posts on your timeline

You’ll notice that some posts on your timeline are much larger than others, spanning both columns instead of sticking to one side or the other. These are the posts that Facebook has deemed most important and has decided to feature. If you want to feature something that isn’t automatically featured, or want to un-feature something that you don’t really think is that important (for example: Facebook decided to feature a status I posted about dropping my keys in an elevator shaft, which is not really something I would choose to highlight), press the star button in the top right corner. Voila!

5. Be aware of potential third-party embarrassment

One of my college classmates, now a PR professional, recently read a story about Lindsay Lohan’s leaked Playboy photos on Yahoo! News. Another one of my Facebook friends read about Miley Cyrus’s cleavage. How do I know? I can see it: on their Timelines and in my News Feed.

I can see this information because these people clicked an “Add to Timeline” button on a social reading application. Now everything they read on these sites they’ve added shows up on Facebook. From sharing what you’re listening to on Spotify to what you’re reading on the Washington Post, tons of new information about your activity is potentially available.

This new level of sharing doesn’t necessarily have to be a problem, as long as you keep it in mind when you engage in potentially embarrassing activity. You can also adjust the privacy settings on these apps, so you can choose to share the knowledge that you read about Ashton Kutcher’s divorce during work hours with the entire world or just a few select people.

Keep in mind…

The information that you choose to share publicly can be optimized with SEO keywords, such as interests and professional expertise. Although your Timeline is your personal profile, it can still be very important from an online marketing standpoint – it’s a method of marketing yourself! Make sure your reputation isn’t tarnished by statuses and photos you’d rather keep to yourself.

Have you enabled the Timeline profile yet? What do you think of it?

Are You Reading All of Your Facebook Messages?

December 9, 2011 - Posted by Amy Rose Brown  

Probably not.

Last year, Facebook switched to the “Social Inbox” so they could sort your messages and let you only see the important ones. Great idea (in theory)! Unless you’re this reporter from Slate, who missed a string of messages about her missing laptop that a man recovered from a New York City taxi.

“It’s not that those other messages aren’t important, but one of them is more meaningful,” writes one of the software engineers at Facebook on the site’s official blog about the Social Inbox’s November 2010 launch. “With new Messages, your Inbox will only contain messages from your friends and their friends. All other messages will go into an Other folder where you can look at them separately.”

This means all your messages from your Facebook friends, including instant messages, emails, and texts sent through Facebook will appear in your regular “Social Inbox” and you won’t miss them (unless you ignore all your messages, which is another issue entirely). But these aren’t the only messages you get.

Where are all your other messages going? Well, actually, they’re going to a separate folder labeled “other messages” that’s been right there in front of your face the whole time, although you may not have noticed or opened it.

Upon opening my other messages folder, I found all the Facebook communication I was missing, and it turns out I wasn’t really missing a lot – although that doesn’t mean that’ll be the case for you. Since January, I had received 171 messages from events and brand pages that I never saw until today. I also missed two spam messages, including:

“hiya Amy. you appear sensational.
email me. my emai is [redacted] for my personal images.
make sure to send it there and not through FB.”

If you’re a brand page holding frequent events, this messaging system has obvious ramifications for you: people aren’t seeing your messages! The “other messages” is basically Facebook’s spam folder. Is there anything you can do about it?

For your Facebook profile: As of right now, there are no settings to change for your “Other messages” folder the way you can for your regular messages. This means you can’t get notified when you receive a message to this folder, or indicate which messages should go where. The only thing you can really do is remember to check both messages folders on a regular basis.

For your Facebook brand page: Just like the Facebook profile, there are no settings to adjust to for brand pages. If your messages are bound to go to the Facebook version of the spam folder and there’s nothing you can do about it, the obvious solution is to stop sending people messages. If you have something important that you want people to see, post it to the news feed where people will see it.

What do you think? Are you annoyed that you’ve been missing some of your messages, or are you happy that unwanted messages aren’t clogging up your inbox? Did you find anything important that you’d missed when you checked the “Other messages” folder or just a bunch of spam? Let us know!