I am a self-professed social media diva. I enjoy the ability to share information, to support others and to connect via social media. However, I also make ample use of my privacy settings. On my personal blog, I don't use my children's real names, and instead use fictional nicknames. I also assist others to increase their social media presence. On a recent webinar I was talking about some of the potential pitfalls of social media use and realized that I didn't have any pictorial examples. So last night I went searching for some examples quickly found a half-dozen Facebook bloopers.
As you can see I removed any personal information and blurred the photos to protect the innocent. The top one is just hilarious. The poster provides their name, the name of the main guest, the date, time and location and shares the post with EVERYONE--that little globe means anyone can see what has been posted to Facebook And then there is the description! This is a no, no for obvious reasons. There are a number of ways to avoid this problem. The original poster could have created a closed group, or a group private message or they could have created an event that required folks to private message the organizer for the location details.
This one was found on a state department of health page. For some unknown reason State Department of Health pages are rife with these kinds of posts, or worse. I've seen people post their phone numbers and Social Security #'s looking for a lost Medicaid card--a quick trip to their profile provides their address and birth date and a criminal has all they need to steal their identity! What surprised me was that this state page, and a few others I have found, respond to the posters using the newsfeed. It would be wise for this page, and others experiencing this type of problem, to periodically post a reminder to readers that they should use email or the private message function to share personal questions or concerns. Additionally, the administrator should remove any posts that provide personal information.
This one is courtesy of a friend. The post was shared only with this friends friends, but that could still be a lot of people. As you can see my friend let everyone know that they were in transit and would be abroad over a holiday weekend. Again, here's where that private message function would be a better bet. Of course, this was how I found out that my friend would be away for the weekend, but I wondered how many other people learned the same thing?
Have any Facebook No no's to share?
