Facebook: Using Lists to Manage Sharing

Lesson 11: Using Lists to Manage Sharing

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All about lists

There may be times when you want to share with some—but not all—of your friends on Facebook. For example, you might want to share some photos from a recent party, but you don't want your grandparents to see them. Or maybe you'd like to connect with friends from your job, but you're concerned about mixing your social and professional life.

You can easily control who you share with by separating your friends into lists. Once you've created a list, you can choose to share certain things with only the people on that list. You can also share something with everyone except for a certain list of friends.

To create a list:

From the homepage, click the Friend Lists section on the left side of the screen.
Click Create List.
Type a name for the list, then type the names of friends you want to add to the list; suggested friends will appear as you type. You can click a suggestion to add that friend.
When you're done, click Create. Your list will be created.

If you're using the mobile app, you'll be able to use existing lists, but you won't be able to create a new list.

Using lists

There are several ways to use lists to control who you share with.

To share something with a list of friends, simply select the list from the audience selector. Note that you may need to select More Options before you can see all of your lists.
To share something with everyone except for a list of friends, choose Custom in the audience selector, then type the name of the list in the These people or lists box.
You can also select a list in the Friend Lists section of the homepage to see a customized News Feed that only shows posts and updates from the people on that list. In the image below, the News Feed is only showing updates from the Close Friends list.