Tip of the Week: How to Prevent a Certain Facebook Friend From Seeing Your Post

What makes Facebook so valuable is that it connects you to a wide variety of people. However, for many users, having such a diverse audience means holding back on sharing their personal opinions, which kind of takes the fun out of social networking. Did you know that Facebook allows you to exclude certain people from seeing your posts? For this week’s tip, we’ll show you how to take advantage of this feature.

To get started, update your status like you normally would. After you’ve typed your message, click on the privacy control button, located on the bottom right side of your status window. This will cause a drop down menu to appear.

Unless you’ve previously changed your privacy setting, it should be set to Friends. You’ll want to change this by scrolling down and clicking on Custom. This will cause a new popup window to open for Custom Privacy.

Next, go to the Don't share with section and select the form. Now type into the form the name of the person you desire to exclude from seeing your post. You can also type the name(s) of additional people that you’d like to exclude as well. Plus, if you happen to have your friends already organized into lists, like family, coworkers, etc., then you can enter an entire list into the “Don’t share with” form.

Once you’ve finished entering all the people that you wish to exclude, select Save Changes. You will now be taken back to the Update Status window. Give your post a final read through and then share it (without having to worry about a certain someone taking it the wrong way) by selecting Post.

In case you’re wondering, the only way that a person you excluded from seeing your post could see it is if you tagged them in the post, or went back and changed the privacy settings. You’ll also want to be mindful of mutual friends. They may relay what you said to everyone in real life. Also remember, screenshots can come back to bite you.

Depending on how sensitive you may be to posting to Facebook, this helpful trick may change the way you use the social network. From a business perspective, consider using this custom privacy setting to express concerns over a product or service without offending any of your Facebook friends associated with it.

Of course, not everyone cares if every Facebook friend reads their post or not. After all, that’s what the unfriend button is for. What about you? Is this a helpful tip, or are you one to post whatever you feel without much regard to who sees it? Share your opinion in the comments below.