When he comes to Facebook, most of us will have a contact list spanning years and even decades of our lives – recent acquaintances among people we’ve known since high school, neighbors we saw just yesterday to old family friends we haven’t seen since we were very younger.
Whatever you think of Facebook, there’s no doubting its reach, and with billions of people on the platform, it’s important to be able to reach only the people you want to hear from.
The good news is that Facebook has many tools and options to help you with this, and we’ve outlined the most important ones below. This is best done in a desktop web browser where you can easily access all relevant Facebook settings.
Limit who can find you
If other people can’t find you, they can’t contact you. If you go to the Facebook Privacy Checkup page and select How people can find you on Facebookyou can go step by step through the relevant settings. With friend requests, for example, you can allow anyone on Facebook to request a connection with you or limit it to friends of friends – meaning that only those people who already know someone you’re connected to will be able to contact you. send a friend request.
You can also set whether people can find you using your email address and phone number. (If your details are in someone’s phone contacts, Facebook can suggest you as a friend.) If you want, you can keep these details private so that no one can find you through these pieces of information.
The last option in this particular section of Facebook settings allows you to decide whether you want your profile to be visible in search engines. If you’d rather not have your Facebook profile pop up when someone types your name into Google, turn off the switch to Do you want non-Facebook search engines to link to your profile? before clicking on Next to view your settings.
Limit who can see what you share
If other people can’t see what you share on Facebook, they can’t comment or react to it. Whenever you post something on the social network, you get what’s called an audience selection menu—the drop-down menu right above the area where you compose the message you want to post.
