Other people might enjoy it, but when friends post on my Facebook Timeline, it really upsets me. It’s my timeline and I don’t want other people’s stuff showing up. If it’s my birthday, maybe, but every other day of the year, I want business stuff showing up, not personal things, tagged photos, etc. Is there a way to disable everyone gaining access to my FB timeline?
First off, as you know, Facebook lets us remember the sage advice of “choose your friends wisely” and apply it in the digital world. If you have friends who are posting junk to your timeline, the first thing to contemplate is whether there might not be a reason they aren’t such good FB friends after all?
Then again, when it’s friends and family, well, there’s another old line about “you can’t pick your family, but you can pick your friends”. Then again, perhaps that doesn’t apply because, well, you know your family members aren’t going to be happy if you decide not to “friend” them, right? 🙂
Alright, enough with the homespun wisdom. Turns out that you can indeed turn off the ability for friends to post on your timeline, but what I suggest instead is that you set things up so that you have to approve each and every posting before it shows up. Let me show you…
On the top right corner, click on the gear to bring up the settings menu, then choose “Privacy Settings”:
This brings up a new screen. On the left look for “Timeline and Tagging”:
Once you choose it, you’ll see a number of different settings you can tweak. Here are the two you’ll want to focus on, as you can see:
The first one lets you shut off the ability of others to post to your Timeline, while the second requires anyone else posting to your Timeline to get your explicit approval first. Lets start by clicking on “Edit” on right side of the first line.
The window opens up a bit and there are some tweaks you can make:
Click on “Friends” and you’ll see that there are two possibilities for permission for your Facebook timeline:
Choose “No One” and only you can post to your Timeline. Period. End of story.
Rather have a bit more latitude so your friends can post to your timeline, but after you approve their entries? Click on “Edit” adjacent to the prompt “Review posts friends tag you in before they appear on your timeline?” and you can tweak the setting.
Oh, and before you leave, look closely at the second section on the page because there are additional settings you might want to tweak now that you know how to work with the FB privacy settings:
That should let you gain better control of your timeline without your darn friends mucking things up. 🙂
how do i stop people (that are not my friends) to comment on my timeline status updates.
Good article but incorrect. If you allow “friends” to post to your timeline, the only posts that go through your approval are the ones that you are “tagged” in. That’s it. I too thought everything went through my approval until today when a pic was posted to my wall by a friend. It was his own cell phone pic. So he just posted it with a short comment. Since it wasn’t tagged, it landed right there on my wall for all my friends to see.
So now I have to decide whether or not I want anyone to post on my timeline at all. Facebook really should have a privacy setting for ALL posts, not just tagged ones.
Thanks Dave, this is really helpful! However, something isn’t quite right. You said in your post: “Rather have a bit more latitude so your friends can post to your timeline, but after you approve their entries? Click on “Edit” adjacent to the prompt “Review posts friends tag you in before they appear on your timeline?” and you can tweak the setting.”
But that’s incorrect. All it controls is posts that your friends have TAGGED you in. Anyone can still post on your wall, for example, to say hi or whatever they feel like. I can find no way in facebook’s settings to control who can post on your page beyond the “friends or no one” option you mentioned above. No way to get any additional latitude than that. Am I right? This is so ridiculous that facebook is doing this. Thanks again Dave for your helpful information!
That’d be a nice capability, Grant, but I don’t think you can do it in Facebook.
How can I disable my Facebook fans from posting LINKS in their comments?