13+ Things Facebook Won’t Tell You
There are 845 million monthly active Facebook members, but we tracked down the few site experts who could share the social network's insider secrets. "Like" to learn their tips? Read on.
from Michelle Crouch
Photographs by Alexa Speyer; Ilustration by Josue Evilla
1. Want to know how much Facebook knows about you?
Go to Account Settings in the Home menu and click “Download a copy of your Facebook data.”
© Dougal Waters/Digital Vision/Thinkstock
2. You may not want to share your updates and other personal information with the whole world.
But Facebook has kept the default setting as Public. It’s better for us if you
share more, and we’re assuming that most of you aren’t going to bother changing your privacy settings.
© Dougal Waters/Digital Vision/Thinkstock
3. You may not see every post from your friends, and only a fraction of your friends may see all your updates.
Facebook wants users to see posts
that will keep them on the site the longest, so it moves up the posts
that are the most liked, shared, and commented on.
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4. If you are signed in to Facebook, we track you while you surf the Internet.
Anytime you visit a page that has a Facebook Like or Share
button, we log that information.
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5. If your posts are set to be Public, burglars can see your status updates and figure out when you’re not in town.
Insurance companies may
also use posted information to raise a premium or deny a claim.
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6. Posting big news like your engagement, the birth of a baby, or your acceptance to grad school?
Facebook will know. We target those types of
announcements by using something called natural language processing, and
then we make sure they stick around in your friends’ news feeds until
the next time they log on.
© Wavebreak Media/Thinkstock
7. It may work to your benefit for us to know a lot about you.
For instance, if you Like the Gap Facebook page because you love to shop there, you’ll appreciate it when a coupon pops up.
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8. Not seeing enough posts from friends you care about—and too many from those you don’t?
Set your news feed to sort by Most Recent, rather than Top News. Then add your favorite people to your Close Friends list and unsubscribe from any friends whose updates you’re not interesting in receiving.
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9. We make money by selling ad space to companies that want to reach you.
They give us demographics—the desired location, career, education level—and we put their ads on the pages of those who meet the criteria.
© Ciaran Griffin/Stockbyte/Thinkstock
10. Do you really want to make sure your friends see your important news (you’re having a garage sale, for example)?
You can pay a fee, around $7 to $10 a post, to move your update to the top of their news feeds.
© iStockphoto/Thinkstock
11. Lots of users hate Timeline, but it’s not going away anytime soon.
It’s a more effective way for people to share, it’s visually appealing,
and brands love it because it gives them a better platform to market their business and show people who they are.
© iStockphoto/Thinkstock
12. You can limit your posts to Facebook friends who live in your city, those who went to your college, or those you work with.
You can even
choose to allow everyone to view a post except your boss. Click the
arrow in the lower right-hand corner of the status update box, and
you’ll see all the options.
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13. Never leave your computer while you’re logged on to Facebook, especially if your coworkers have a sense of humor.
For a while,
whenever someone at our headquarters did that, we’d write something like
“I love Justin Bieber” as his or her status update. When that happened
to me, I’d get e-mails asking, “Are you OK?”
© iStockphoto/Thinkstock
14. Be selective in choosing friends and Liking pages.
If you say yes to everyone, you’re going to see lots of things in your news feed you don’t care about, and you’ll have to take the extra time to filter them out.
© James Braund/Digital Vision/Thinkstock
15. Hide from all your friends on Facebook Chat by going to the chat box and clicking Go Offline.
If it’s just one particularly annoying friend that you want to avoid, click on his name in the chat window, hit the cog icon that’s in the top right, and choose Go Offline to [Name].
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16. Some information can’t be made private on Facebook.
Your name,
profile picture, cover picture, network, gender, and username are always
publicly available.
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17. Noticed fewer fans on your favorite Facebook pages?
That’s probably because the company has recently been cracking down on phony profiles created en masse by shady companies to boost a page’s Facebook popularity. In a recent filing, Facebook estimated that as many as 83
million of its profiles are fake, though some are duplicate pages set up
by real people.
© iStockphoto/Thinkstock
18. Here's how to get the site to work faster and more efficiently:
Connect to a Wi-Fi network before using your phone to log on to Facebook.
© Monkey Business/Thinkstock
19. Watch when you Like a company, or post about a product.
Your interaction might be shown to your friends as an ad for that company.
Sources: David Jacobs, consumer protection counsel at the Electronic
Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C.; Brittany Darwell, lead
writer for insidefacebook.com; Justin Lafferty, coeditor at
allfacebook.com; Cameron Camp, cybersecurity expert at ESET in San
Diego; and a former Facebook employee
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