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May 10, 2011

Your Facebook Profile: Targeted Updates

Are you Facebook friends with other members of your congregation? Do members of your congregation "like" your status updates?

According to the following Episcopal News Service story, more and more congregational leaders are using Facebook as a way to connect with members of their congregation. Jennifer McNally recently wrote of the benefits of using Facebook to enhance congregational life, but as you might imagine there are also recurring concerns. For instance, how much should congregational leaders share about themselves? What should congregational leaders weigh when posting an update that will potentially alienate members of the congregation? (See these example guidelines for assistance.)

In this post, I've decided to take another approach to these questions and will walk you step-by-step through how you can target your Facebook updates to particular sets of friends. So, for instance, if you have an update about a family barbecue that you only want your family to see, you will be able to post your update without it appearing on the wall of every member of your congregation. Please consider sharing this with the leaders in your congregation who are active on Facebook.

Step 1: Creating Friends Lists

This step takes some time and effort but it is key to being able to target your status updates to particular sets of friends.

Follow this link to your "Edit Friends Page." As you will see, on the top, right-hand corner of the page there is a button for creating friends lists.
The following blog post on Facebook privacy settings encourages people to make at least three lists of friends: family, close friends, and professional. For congregational leaders who do not work in the church, I would suggest an additional list labeled with the name of your church.
Of course, segmenting friends into categories can be a bit difficult. In her blog post, The Proper Distance, Richelle Thompson wrote about how it is oftentimes the case that congregation members become close friends. Thankfully this has been taken into account and friends can be put into multiple lists. There's no need to anguish over that cousin who is one of your closest friends who is also a member of your congregation. They can be included in family, friends and church.

Step 2: Targeting Your Facebook Updates

One of the major benefits to creating these lists is that you can then target your updates to particular audiences. In this example, I've decided to play the role of a congregational leader sending an update about the upcoming annual parish meeting.

Once you've written your message, click on the privacy button (symbolized by the lock) just to the left of the "Share" button. This opens up a drop down menu that offers you the option of "customizing" who will see this particular post. When you click on “customize” you will be taken to a page called “Custom Privacy.”

Once you are on the Custom Privacy page, choose "Specific People" in the drop down box that completes the sentence "Make this visible to these people." Once you have chosen "Specific People" you should then be able to enter in the name of the appropriate friends list you'd like to receive this post. (Note - Facebook also allows you to hide a post from specific individuals.)
Save those settings.

Be sure to confirm whom you are sending your post to before pressing "Share." You can do so by hovering your mouse over the privacy button. As you can see below, doing so confirmed that I'm sending this post to the list I created called "My Church."
Once you've confirmed this, press "Share."

Having written all this, I sincerely hope you'll continue to follow those very helpful guidelines that are out there about what congregational leaders should and shouldn't be posting. This is just one additional tool for a subtler level of targeting your messages. If you would like to find out more information about how you can limit your privacy settings on Facebook, I'd suggest this excellent blog post from All Facebook: The Unofficial Facebook Resource.

Please comment below if you have additional thoughts about posting targeted updates on Facebook.