Seven Things to Stop Doing on Facebook

Seven Things To Stop Doing on Facebook

1. Using a Weak Password
Avoid simple names or words you can find in a dictionary, even with numbers tacked on the end. Instead, mix upper- and lower-case letters, numbers, and symbols. A password should have at least eight characters. One good technique is to insert numbers or symbols in the middle of a word, such as this variant on the word “houses”: hO27usEs!

2. Leaving Your Full Birth Date in Your Profile
It’s an ideal target for identity thieves, who could use it to obtain more information about you and potentially gain access to your bank or credit card account. If you’ve already entered a birth date, go to your profile page and click on the Info tab, then on Edit Information. Under the Basic Information section, choose to show only the month and day or no birthday at all.

3. Overlooking Useful Privacy Controls
For almost everything in your Facebook profile, you can limit access to only your friends, friends of friends, or yourself. Restrict access to photos, birth date, religious views, and family information, among other things. You can give only certain people or groups access to items such as photos, or block particular people from seeing them. Consider leaving out contact info, such as phone number and address, since you probably don’t want anyone to have access to that information anyway.

4. Posting Your Child’s Name in a Caption
Don’t use a child’s name in photo tags or captions. If someone else does, delete it by clicking on Remove tag. If your child isn’t on Facebook and someone includes his or her name in a caption, ask that person to remove the name.

5. Mentioning That You’ll Be Away From Home
That’s like putting a “no one’s home” sign on your door. Wait until you get home to tell everyone how awesome your vacation was and be vague about the date of any trip.

6. Letting Search Engines Find You
To help prevent strangers from accessing your page, go to Search section of Facebook’s privacy controls and select Only Friends for Facebook search results. Be sure the box for public search results isn’t checked.

7. Permitting Youngsters to Use Facebook Unsupervised
Facebook limits its members to ages 13 and over, but children younger than that do use it. If you have a young child or teenager on Facebook, the best way to provide oversight is to become one of their online friends. Use your e-mail address as the contact for their account so that you receive their notifications and monitor their activities. “What they think is nothing can actually be pretty serious,” says Charles Pavelites, a supervisory special agent at the Internet Crime Complaint Center. For example, a child who posts the comment “Mom will be home soon, I need to do the dishes” every day at the same time is revealing too much about the parents’ regular comings and goings.

Facebook Do’s and Don’ts: Tips to maximize Facebook experience

Facebook is a fun and easy way to stay connected to friends and family but it can be a bit confusing at first. Here are some tips to help you make the most of your Facebook experience.

Facebook Dos
Do use your real name. The idea behind these sites is for friends to stay in touch and reconnect. If you use a fake name people you knew in elementary school, from summer vacations, from real-life social groups you have left and friends who moved away, will not be able to find you.

Do use a real picture of you in your profile. For the same reasons you should use your real name, a real picture of you is a must. People can’t tell if you’re you from your name alone. That being said, keep the picture you post modest, provocative pictures send the wrong message.

Do look at the pictures of people who send you friend requests. Even if you don’t recognize them from the photo currently on display you may recognize the person from a different picture.

Do create your photo albums with privacy settings so only your friends can see them. You can change the settings in the future if you want but it is always best to limit who can see the more intimate moments of your life.

Do tag the pictures you post so that friends know when you have put their picture online. It is just common courtesy to let people know when you have put their likeness on the internet.

Do be tolerant when you get friend requests from strangers, especially if your photo is not of you. You may not be the only person on the planet with your name. Just hit reject and don’t worry about it. People are not notified when you reject their friend request.

Do use the Facebook privacy settings to limit who can see your full profile. Set it so that only friends can see things like your pictures, your wall, and your personal and contact information.

Do create a private group for you and your close friends. Make the group administrated and by invite only and only allow friends to join if you know them in real life.

Do limit the type of email notifications that come to you from Facebook. If you don’t you could find your email bombarded by Facebook messages.

Do report any threats of violence or other inappropriate posts or images to Facebook and to the proper real world authorities like school officials, parents and police.

Facebook Don’ts
Don’t leave the default Facebook privacy settings as set. Go in and customize your privacy. Of particular importance, limit what people can see when you poke or message them before you have added them as a friend. The default setting allows people who are not friends yet and whom you poke or message to see your entire profile.

Don’t be afraid to allow some people to only see a limited version of your profile. Limited profiles show things like your profile picture, your name, and your basic info but do not show things like your wall, your interests, your contact info and any images of you that are not used as in your profile..

Don’t ever announce on your wall, or on any public wall, where you plan to go or who you plan to go with. Cyber stalkers are a real threat and if you have one this tells them where to find you in real life.

Don’t be afraid to join public groups about interests you share. Just be careful what you post on the walls of these groups.

Don’t accept Facebook invites to events. If you plan to attend send your acceptance using a private message or tell the host when you see them in person.

Don’t use Facebook to bully, harass, spread rumors, challenge fights or otherwise incite violence. Facebook is a social utility, not an anti-social utility.

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Tags | do's, don'ts, facebook, social network

Facebook Etiquette: Tips for your safety and security

Balancing your work and personal life on social networking tools such as Facebook has become more complex than ever — and the dangers go beyond the well-publicized examples of posting party pictures to your profile.

A more subtle faux pas can affect your online reputation and even future job path, as your friend list on Facebook includes both personal and professional contacts. Information you post can mess up your work relationships and personal ones in one quick swoop.

Here are some suggestions for managing your Facebook profile and your overall social networking persona, and warnings about places where you can get into trouble with people who matter to you personally and professionally.

1. Choosing your profile picture

Thoughtful: Some people militantly believe that Facebook is all personal while LinkedIn is all professional. If this sounds like you, you might choose a Facebook pic of yourself fishing, hanging out at a party or playing a guitar. You’re better off to err on the side of caution here, by keeping your profile picture professional, or at least neutral. Your photo doesn’t need to be in a studio with a boring canvas backdrop – it could be outside on your deck or on a mountain side, for instance – but it has to be fairly even-keeled. (This is different than LinkedIn, where photos should be strictly professional).

Thoughtless: Don’t post profile pictures that are “too sexy, cartoonish or that might alienate your audience.” A look through your friend list can usually reveal the ones she’s talking about. The stylized glamour shot, the quick snapshot of slicked up hair or low-cut dresses taken right before heading to a party, or worse, costume-like pics: wet suits and surfboards, bike gear, Halloween outfits -the list goes on.

2. Filling Out Your Biography

Thoughtful: The biographical section of social networks vary. On Facebook, the service provides fields for a variety of interests, both professional and personal. Don’t be afraid to post some nuggets that convey who you are, within reason. On Facebook, you can decide with great granularity what information people can view by altering your privacy settings. For instance, you can set it so every visitor to your profile sees that you enjoy golfing, reading and civil war history, but maybe only a certain group of people see your religion, political affiliations and relationships. For Facebook’s “About me” section, building on the Twitter doctrine, It should be short and concise. Don’t worry about being clever.

Thoughtless: While there aren’t many numbers to back this assertion (because Facebook is a private company, and data can be hard to come by), most social networking and identity experts believe a great many Facebook users never so much as glance at their privacy settings pages. The same probably holds true for other social networks. Remember that social networks plan to monetize their service by ensuring that you share as much information as possible. As such, you should believe that they’ll share as much information about you as they can, and make it available to the widest audience.

The default settings for Facebook, for example, make all your profile information available for everyone on the service to see. Assume from the get go that anything you put in there is viewable on the public internet. Go in with that line of thinking. Then go in and say, if you don’t want to make certain information available to certain people, go turn them off with the privacy settings.

With the information you do share, avoid being vain. Social networks do enable, if not encourage, a bit of narcissism. But don’t assume people want to read a novel about your life. Also, be protective of your family. It’s fine to list yourself as “married” in the info section, for instance, but don’t necessarily feel that you have to put down a link to your significant other. If you have young children, for their protection and privacy, it’s highly recommended you don’t include their names anywhere in the bio or in pictures of them that you decide to share.

Oh, and a word about age. While you may want to include your birthday on your Facebook profile, so people can message you on the big day, you should exclude the birth year. Your friends and family know how old you are, and there’s no reason for your professional ones to know.

3. Posting Content

Thoughtful: Post content that highlights your personal interests and your professional areas of expertise. A marketing professional might post some interesting links for a relevant trade publication he or she wanted to share, for example. Posting personal picture slideshows is fine — again, within reason. You clearly want to avoid the aforementioned pitfalls of displaying shots of wild revelry. But for all the agony about what’s acceptable and what’s not, remember that offering contacts a decent glimpse into what makes you, you can have business benefits. It strengthens relationships. It really helps establish connections. People like to do business with people they know.

Thoughtless: Spamming people is a big no-no, as it can irrevocably ruin your social capital. It’s great to be so passionate about things in both your professional life and personal life that you feel compelled to share it with people who are important to you, but remember that people can only take so much time out of their day. Also, don’t assume they care about every little thing in your personal life. People know you’re proud of your kids, for example, and that speaks to your commitment as a parent. Yet you need to know when to draw the line somewhere in how much they want to hear.

Definitely keep your romantic break-ups and get-together in private forums, like e-mails, IMs and (who still uses it anymore?) the phone.

Oh, and this one should be self-explanatory: don’t go flapping your gum about your company’s affairs.

4. Talking to One vs. Many

Thoughtful: Posing a question to your entire network is OK, provided it’s relevant to all of them, or at least won’t be viewed as a nuisance. For instance, you might ask, “Getting a new phone. iPhone or BlackBerry?” Such a question will be relevant to a lot of folks who have gone through the same issue. The key is, if you’re on the receiving end and want to weigh in on such an issue, be sure to respond to that person only – unless it’s been made clear that he or she wants your comments public. This way, you avoid spamming people.

Thoughtless: Know that self-satisfied guy who unrelentingly decides to hit reply-all to every group e-mail that’s sent in your company? You don’t want to be that guy on social networks. On Facebook, one of the most utilized features is the Wall. It’s a fun place to leave publicly displayed messages and a bit of witty banter. However, making specific plans with a person on the Wall, for example, is rude to that person’s other profile visitors. Too many times, you see “let’s get a drink at 5 today” posted to someone’s Wall. Unless you want to include all of that person’s friends in on the social engagement, there’s no reason not to pose that question in the private messaging section of Facebook (or any social network for that matter; Twitter, for instance, has the direct message function).

5. Watching Your Tone

Thoughtful: It’s important to keep a polite and measured tone on social networks; after all, the mainstream ones like Facebook are an extension of our lives in real life (that’s not necessarily the case in virtual worlds, but that’s a whole other topic). Say things you’d feel comfortable saying in person, and avoid inside jokes that only a few of your contacts would understand.

Thoughtless: With a social network that is fairly open, nobody is really going to be impressed when you post inside jokes that they don’t understand; in fact, you run the risk of insulting people if they think you’re making some veiled or coded comment about them. Remember, within most social networks, you can set up private groups where those kinds of exchanges will not only be more appropriate, but also encouraged. It’s better to be clear than clever. Don’t expect people to get it. Be very explicit.

Finally, sarcastic humor and anger can be dangerous in social network postings, just as they are in e-mail messages. Think twice before sharing.

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Tags | etiquette, facebook, social network