Facebook launched Community Pages this week, which are part of a bigger picture for Facebook which I may write about at some point on Andrew Tech Help. Today I offer a small warning to all of you about what you write on Facebook and how Facebook will display this information publicly in places you don’t expect if you have an open profile.

This is an example of a community page for a school. The Related Posts by Friends section isn’t a big deal. Any of your friends who uses the words in the title of the page, in this case “Ormiston College” in any of their statuses or posts, will appear on this page, this section will vary between each person due to who their friends are and what they’ve said. The bigger section is the one which says Related Global Posts. This will list anything Facebook can find on Public Profiles about the topic, again in this case “Ormiston College”. So if you have a public profile, then you gotta be really careful about what you say when you mention words that could appear on a community page where they could be seen by anyone.

The easiest way to solve this is to make sure your profile is Private.

You can do this by going to the Account menu on the top right of the screen and choosing Privacy Settings and then clicking the Profile Information link. On this screen, set at a minimum the Posts by Me, Posts by Friends and Comments on Posts sections to Only Friends. It’s probably a good idea to set them ALL to Only Friends. As you can see below – I’ve also created another list and am setting custom settings applying to that list (which I’ve named probation).

At this point, while you’re fixing your privacy settings, I’d also check your contact details settings, by clicking Back to Privacy and then the Contact Information link. Here you can set what pieces of your contact information (phone, address, e-mail) etc appear to the public too. I’d set most of these to Only Friends as well.

So yea, I’ve hoped this little tutorial has helped with securing your Facebook Profile. These Community Pages are part of a bigger picture, but if you want them to work in your favour, then you gotta lock down your profile a little bit.

BTW: I happen to disagree with the comments in the pictures above, just to make sure you know!