Facebook has once again enhanced its search engine with it’s most recent upgrade, Graph Search. This introduces many intriguing features for those with personal profiles, and as always, also prompts some thoughts about privacy.

In our view, Facebook handled this upgrade effectively by deploying an information page (see the show notes) that defines Graph Search, includes a behind the scenes discussion on how the mechanics of the search tool works, and perhaps most importantly, included a reminder about user privacy settings.

Central to this podcast discussion is how you choose to use your Facebook personal profile. We advise folks on this particular social platform to use Facebook Pages for business and keep their traditional profile personal. This means to truly manage your privacy settings, you need to consider how you curate your Facebook personal profile.

Key Benefit of Graph Search:

• Discovery - finding who else in your network or geographic region shares a similar interest (For example, you can now search for friends who live close by and also happen to share your love of Starbucks.) Facebook’s focus is to create a stronger social experience by matching your friends to common likes between you both.

Key Tools to Consider:

1. Audience Selector: you can control on a post by post basis what folks see.

2. Managing future and past posts via Privacy Settings: decide who can see your posts (Friends, Friends of friends, etc). This does not mean that any past public posts are not still cached somewhere else even once past posts are re-configured.

3. Control who can look you up by your phone and email address.

4. Review your Activity Log to confirm what is visible and manage accordingly.

Show Notes:

• RegEd screencast on configuring the Privacy Settings on your Facebook personal profile

• Facebook’s Graph Search information page

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