

Once you start adding friends to this list, the audience selector displays the option to share a post with “Friends except Acquaintances.” Using this option blocks the post from being shared with anyone you've put in the acquaintances list but allows all of your other friends to see the post. AcquaintancesĪdding a friend to the Acquaintances list is used for people you want to share fewer posts. You'll also see posts from your friends higher in your NewsFeed, but from my research on the web, no one seems to know exactly how Facebook manages the ranking. One feature of the Close Friends list is that Facebook gives you a notification (an email and notification on your smartphone) whenever a close friend posts anything. Of course, people in the close friends list will see anything you share with the Friends option in the audience selector, so this is an easy way to identify a group of friends who you share with the most. By choosing Close Friends in the audience selector, only the friends in your Close Friends list can see your post. The Close Friends list is an easy way to collect the people with whom you want to share everything you post. Let's go over how Facebook recommends you use each of these lists and then we'll look at the custom list option. A friend can't tell that you've added them to or removed them from a list, who's on the list is only visible to you. Each list has certain features that make them useful, but none of them contain any friends until you add a friend to the list. The three lists that Facebook provides for you to use are Close Friends, Acquaintances and Restricted. Let's see what Facebook's lists do first when it comes to audience selection.

Facebook provides three lists for you to add friends to and custom lists that you can create. Custom also is where you can share a post to a list of friends if you have a list setup.Ī list is a selection of friends that's saved for reusing in posts. The custom option includes features that allow you to fine-tune your post sharing to share a post with specific friends or to exclude specific friends from being able to view a post. Tagging occurs when you mention a friend in a post or the picture included with a post and Facebook includes a link to that person.įacebook Mobile Audience Selector Options As a result, the audience expands to include not only your friends but the friends of the person you tagged. When you share a post with friends and tag someone, their friends can also see the post. Facebook's privacy policy for people limits tagging so you can only tags friends, and you can only be tagged by friends. A tag includes a link to that person's timeline and lets that person know they have been mentioned in a post. For a post with an audience of friends, it's possible to tag a friend in a post. However, if you selected an audience of "public" for a post, then all future posts would be shared with the everyone until you changed the audience.įriends and Only Me have some additional options. Since most people tend to share things with friends on Facebook, this selection doesn't cause any problems. So if you pick "friends," all your future posts would be shared with friends until you change it. When you choose an audience, the selection remains in place until you change it.

Custom - options for selecting which friends can see or not see, and select a list.Friends - all of your friends on Facebook can see this.Public - anyone on or off Facebook can see this.Facebook Audience Selector Desktop OptionsĬlicking or tapping on the audience selector button will display the options for choosing the audience (the people who will see the post).
