How Not To Annoy Facebook Friends Who Don't Do Contesting

How Not To Annoy Facebook Friends Who Don’t Do Contesting

UPDATE: Unfortunately the new Facebook Privacy settings do not allow the exclusion of people from seeing your likes. At the moment, they say:

We currently do not allow users to hide the pages they like from their friends. However, we plan to provide more robust privacy controls for Pages in the future.

I will update this post when they implement better privacy settings. I hope they do it soon !!

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Sponsors of Facebook contests often ask entrants to ‘Like’ their fan page, to post on their fan page wall, to vote for or ‘Like’ other contest entries and so on. Then your personal Facebook wall becomes polluted with ‘<your name> liked Flower Boutique’, ‘<your name> entered Winter Getaway sweepstakes’, ‘<your name> voted for Blue Jeans’…

Maybe most of your friends will be nice and not mention it, but others might be more straightforward and tell you that their news feed is simply unreadable because of your never ending contesting posts. Some of those friends might even quietly ‘unfriend’ you. In fact, Facebook doesn’t notify you about the ‘unfriend’ events, so you might not even notice that you’re loosing friends to contesting.

Even if you go to your wall and manually remove those entries, they still appear in your friends news feeds. On the other hand, you likely have some contesting friends on Facebook, and you don’t want to hide those posts from them.

Well, I am writing this guide to help you out. I have discovered a neat way to selectively organize to whom you want to show the contesting posts, and from whom you want to hide them on Facebook.

Here’s how.

Step 1. Create a friends list of sweeping buddies

Go to your Friend Lists page. Click ‘Create a List’:

Name your list. I named mine ‘Sweeping Buddies’. Then, select those friends who like contesting. When done selecting, click Create List:

Step 2. Open customization option for visibility of your Likes

Now, go to your Profile Page. On the sidebar, where all your Likes are, click the small pencil icon and choose ‘Change Visibility Settings’:

Privacy Settings Page will open up. For ‘See your likes, activities and other connections’ option, click on ‘Everyone’, and choose ‘Customize’ option:

Step 3. Choose who will see your Likes and activities

Select ‘Specific People’ option:

In the textfield under ‘Specific people’, start typing the name of your list, that you created in Step 1. Once you see the list name in the autosuggest, choose it. Then, click ‘Save Setting’:

Note: Alternatively, you could choose a list of people to hide the Likes from. Then you would have to create list(s) of non-contester friends first.

And, you’re done!

Only your sweeping buddies will see your contesting activities from now on.

About the Author, Paulina Masson

Paulina is an avid contest lover. Winning interesting contest prizes changed her life. She dared snowboarding after she won a snowboard from Wonder. When she won another one, she and her husband hit the mountains. She loves extreme sports and all things outdoors.