Great advice to stay safe on Facebook

Let's face it. You are on the front lines.

If you are your organizations' Facebook Fan Page administrator, you are no longer just yourself, independent citizen on Facebook. You are representing your organization and often become the public face for your online network. And it's weird.

Technically, you are not allowed to create a second "professional" profile, and technically you are not allowed to create a profile as if your organization is a person. I say "technically", because many, many admins have pulled this off. But that would help solve much of the problems.

With some of the recent changes to Facebook Fan Pages, things have gotten better. For instance, it used to be if I posted content to my org's FB page, it would show up as coming from me, personally. Now it shows up as coming from my org. That's good.

But before the change, I was frustrated because this meant anyone could click on my profile and see information about me. I would also get numerous friend requests from our supporters and although I hated to turn anyone down, I had to make a hard and fast rule: I never accept friend requests from anyone I don't know personally. I post pictures of my kids on my personal FB page, so I had to draw the line somewhere. Plus some of my own personal opinions and thoughts might not jive too nicely with some of my org's more conservative members. If I had a "professional" second profile, I could accept those requests and maintain my privacy. But no.

Again, tough but important choices in a ginormous gray area. I suspect we'll be hearing much more about this as time marches on. But back to my point.

The changes have improved much of this, but there is still an element of privacy invasion when you need to communicate directly with a supporter (that asks a question, or if you interact with them on Facebook Causes.) There is also the uncomfortableness of what to do when you inevitably get a friend request from your boss. They really don't need to know how you are progressing in Farmville. During work hours.

I suggest changing all of the Privacy settings to "Just Friends" and in your Friends section, create lists. I have one list for "work" and one list for "family" and they don't get to see too much of what I post (you go back into your privacy settings and choose "Customize" from the dropdown and you can choose to limit information to be viewable to all friends except an individual's name or a list.) Everyone not on those lists gets to see everything.

More info here, in a great article I read in The New York Times, titled "5 Easy Steps to Stay Safe (and Private!) on Facebook." (Originally from ReadWriteWeb)

Still not sure you've done it correctly? This page has a really cool feature where you can type in one of your friends' names (or your boss') to see exactly how your page will look to them.