Tip of the Week: Separate Your Facebook Timeline From What You Share on Your News Feed

Have you ever encountered something that you thought was interesting on social media, and you wanted to share it with your friends? Before, sharing a link or a story would also slap a status update on your Facebook profile, for all of the world to see. Now, however, Facebook offers an alternative, in the form of sharing a post on the News Feed without also posting it to your timeline.

Why would you want to do this? Perhaps you’ve found something that you want to share with the world, but you don’t want it to be stuck on your personal Facebook page. While you could just go into your Timeline and delete the post, it’s more efficient to just not have it appear there at all. Plus, maybe you want to share a link on your News Feed, but don’t want the post to appear on your Timeline to be associated with you at a later date.

In order to take advantage of this feature, all you have to do is make a new status update, and before you click Post, check the box Hide From Your Timeline. This will display the post in your News Feed, without posting it to your Timeline. You can still choose who the post is shared with, whether it’s public, to your friends only, or even specific friends on another timeline.

However, the posts that you’ve published to News Feed can still be searched, and they’ll appear in Your Posts, which is accessible only to you. It’s up to you whether you want to go the extra mile and keep posts hidden from your timeline, or to just not post at all.

This is just one way that technology continues to move toward a more anonymous and privacy-oriented goal. Trending technologies like Snapchat have likely attributed to this development with Facebook. However, it needs to be mentioned that, regardless of how many measures you put into place to protect your privacy online, the only real way to maximize your personal privacy is to not use social media at all, and to keep any sensitive information that you don’t want shared with the world, off of the Internet.

Regardless of how you use the Internet, when you put information on your social media pages, you’re sharing it with the entire world. It’s your responsibility to make sure that you don’t post anything that can be used by hackers. This includes Social Security numbers, credit card numbers, and even some other information like email addresses, phone numbers, and home addresses. Ultimately, it’s up to you to determine what you should and shouldn’t share on Facebook, as well as how you share it.

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