The primary purpose of social media accounts is to help us connect with people all around the world. With the emergence of multiple social media platforms, it has become easy for us to know every detail about someone living miles apart. Numerous social media platforms offer multiple features.
All these features have multiple purposes. Some of them are business promotional purposes while some other features are for sheer entertainment/information. Such a plethora of features makes us vulnerable to scammers and hackers existing online.
With the growing number of cybercrimes, it is imperative to put a stop to it by implementing more security features. The different social media platforms (primarily Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn) are updated periodically to increase the safety features.
They are doing their part to protect their users. From our end, did you know that we too can take charge of who sees what in our social media accounts? Here is what you can do to control what will be visible in your social media account.
How can you control who sees what in social media platforms?
Choose the audience:
The first thing is to set your audience. Facebook offers the best options to set who can see your posts or your account. When you are going to post something, you will see a dropdown that enables you to choose who can see the post.
You can set certain parameters for certain posts. You can make it public, you can select “friends only”, and you can choose “only me”. The most customizable option is “friends except”. Here you can select a specific person or a few more people in your friends-list who cannot see a post.
Public or Private:
Instagram and Twitter don’t come with customized features like Facebook. For any post you do, either that can be a public post or it can be a private post. Thus, it is important to be sure about something before posting something publicly.
You will have the option to change the accounts back and forth to public and private if needed. Twitter has a feature to protect your Tweets. Go to the settings and then visit “privacy and safety” and enable “protect your tweets”. Visit Instagram settings and select “Privacy and security” and then click on “private account”.
Hide your stories:
Instagram stories are one of the most used features on this platform. You have the option to hide your stories from certain people while keeping the main photo feed public. Also, you can post stories to a selected group of people or close friends instead of all displaying to all your followers.
Visit settings, click on “privacy” and then “story” and select who you don’t want to see your story. You can also configure a list of close friends who can see your story every time you post something.
Protecting the posts
Social media platforms are updated in such a way that when you post something, you have the option to protect it as well. Twitter allows you to hide replies. Click on the arrow next to the tweet and select “hide reply”. The person will not know it’s hidden.
On Instagram, you can turn off commenting for a post or a story. Visit settings and click on “comments” or “story”. You have the option to only allow people you are following to leave a comment. Also, you can mute offensive comments or turn on the “manual filter” to ensure that specific words don’t appear.
You can delete existing comments by long-pressing them (for Android0 or by swiping left (for iOS). On Facebook, click on the three dots (from PC) or long-press the comment (in the app) to delete or hide it. The author will not be notified, but if they revisit, they will see their comments have been deleted.
Blocking the trouble creators
This is a very common safety feature that has been there in all the social media platforms for quite a long time. You can block anyone that causes trouble in your social media platforms. On Twitter and Facebook, you can open up a profile, click the three dots, and then choose “block”.
Instagram will still give you an additional feature, known as “restrict”. It is not a full block. When the person comments on your post, the comments will have to be approved before they become public. Also, they cannot see you online.
Mute users
If you want to hide someone from the feeds, but you don’t want to block them, then you can mute them instead. They will not know that they have been muted. The posts and comments will not appear to you.
In Twitter, you can visit the profile, tap the three dots, you will see the menu option. From there you can choose to mute. On Instagram, open a profile, click on “following” and then click on “Mute”. The same can be done on Facebook. Open the profile, tap on “friends” and click on “unfollow”.
Know this, while commenting on any post, anyone will be able to see your comments whether they are in your friend list or not.
Prevent people from tagging you
Everyone is not comfortable to get tagged in posts and comments. If you are one of them then you can limit the tagging too. For Facebook, go to settings, visit the Timeline, and tagging. Here you can review the posts that you are tagged before they get appeared to your timeline.
You can limit the wider audience even if you cannot stop them completely from tagging.
On Instagram, go to settings, choose “tags” and select “manually approve tags”. On Twitter, you cannot stop the mentions, but you can stop the tags in photos. Click on settings, go to “privacy and safety” and then click on “photo tagging”.
A few more safety features include, not sharing your live location with every single post. It might be great to show off, but not so great to ensure privacy. Do not share personal information like card details or PIN numbers of any other passwords.
Also, avoid using the same passwords on different social media platforms. Make sure you check the box to “never” when Google asks to “save password” for future use.
Are you using all these social media features? Share your thoughts with Skyram Technologies here.
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