It is Saturday and I just had a monthly general cleaning in my house. I just thought my Facebook account might need some de-clutter as well.As a budding internet entrepreneur, my personal profile account is also my professional page. So, I reviewed my profile thoroughly and saw that it needs some major clean-up. Limiting your information into strangers’ mode is for your safety and privacy sake. Make our personal accounts as neat and welcoming to visitors by making a top to bottom purging of Facebook data and 3rd party accounts.
1. Photos and personal videos- remove anything revealing too much of your personal life, irrelevant photos and bad angles -anything of bad taste. Some employers and companies also visit your Facebook pages to see the other side of you. You may not want them to see photos that would destroy your credibility, ayt? Same thing with your children’s accounts, check their photos and share your opinion about photos that they will be proud of and those that are not.
2. Tags-scan through videos, photos and ads of other people with you tagged on it. Some advertisers use photo-tagging campaign to sell clothes, jewelry and even houses. This is a very spammy activity and your tag should be removed. These ad taggers sees your profile through the tag, access your friend list and grow their network and the cycle just repeats. If you really like the photo, you might as well share it on your own post, right?
3. Apps- go to Privacy Settings, click Apps and Website link at the bottom of the page. I found mine has 267 apps -mostly on games and quizzes. Remove anything you haven’t used in the last 3 months. This lessens the risk for suspicious malware hacking in your profile using 3rd party apps. I am not saying that all apps have malware, but anything that has been inactive for a long time I think, should be purged-out of your system.
4. Profile Information-Remove anything you don’t want identity thieves to harvest: your email, home town, and birthdate (with the year on it). My husband had found 3 suspiciously-identical Facebook profiles of his name sake with information copied as well (hey, how many Cosme Seneca’s do we have in the world, eh?). We may not know what these people are up to, so better keep personal details to your FB friends’ view only. On the other hand, you may fill out the likes and interest part (books, music, movies) so as to put interesting content on your profile page.
5. Privacy-if you are not using much apps then you might want to use the https secured access rather than the http://. The big difference is the “S”, which stands for SECURE. In order for you to freely use it, Facebook has to pay for an SSL certificate for it. -might as well as take advantage. In the privacy Options, you may also need to edit who’s to see your pages, photo albums and notes.
6. Bad notes, messages and comments– remove all incriminating and negative verbiage on feeds, no matter how old they were. Make it a habit to post only positive comments. These might be used by some people against you in the future when you least expect it. Teach your children to do the same.
7. Friend list- edit your friends list, categories them in groups and remove those you really do not know and are fond of tagging you into selling something.
To help you better decide, categorize data as: “banned”, “your eyes only”, “nice to see” and “great to see”. Keep only “nice to see” and “great to see” category information online. A neat and well-kept Facebook profile shows a lot about yourself. Your online reputation is not only limited into Facebook. It is you and your family’s life as well.
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Maribeth Oliver is a home-based micro-entrepreneur, writer and a mom. She shares her insights about family life, internet use and home-based career opportunities. Her newest site,http://articlelab.net provides comprehensive article-writing training for homebased internet writers as well as aspiring copywriters. Get this free information on “How to Effectively Jumpstart Your Homebased Career” by visiting her site now.