How To Avoid Embarrassing Wall Posts on Your Facebook

While it’s nice to know that you and your friend had a great time getting wasted at the holiday party last night, it’s probably not something all your friends should know. Your friends may not use Facebook for connecting with professional contacts, and as a result they don’t think twice about casually posting something that should be kept more private. As such, it makes sense to control what’s visible to others. There are two places where you can configure your wall privacy settings: directly from your profile page and from the profile privacy page.

In order to edit the privacy settings from your profile page, click on the “Options” link directly under the publisher. The image below shows how to control your settings in three easy steps. The most dramatic modifications that you can make is unchecking the box which says “Friends may post to my wall”. Most users want to be able to communicate via the wall so disabling this functionality will prevent anyone from communicating publicly with you.

If you don’t want to take the most extreme step by blocking users from writing on your wall, you can customize who can view wall posts made by your friends by clicking on the drop down directly next to “Who can see posts made by my friends?” I recommend preventing all professional contacts from being able to view posts made by your friends.