Summary
From locking your profile and limiting your content’s visibility to tracking the links and ads you visit, Facebook offers numerous lesser-known features that most people aren’t taking advantage of. These features can improve your privacy and make monitoring your activity easier, enriching your experience on the platform.
1Lock Your Facebook Profile
By default, your Facebook profile is publicly accessible to everyone. Anyone, whether they have a Facebook account or not, can view your profile, including your profile picture, shared posts, and other activities. While this allows people in your circle to find and connect with you, it poses several privacy risks.
Someone could download your photos and copy other information to impersonate you and scam your contacts. They could track and misuse your shared information, spam you and your friends, spread misinformation, and more. To prevent these issues, you can lock your profile, making it visible only to people you’ve added as friends.
Check outhow you can completely lock your profile on Facebookand what happens when you do so.
2Track Your Interactions With the Activity Log
It also allows you to filter activities by date or type, making it easy to find specific interactions. If you want to clean up your Facebook profile for professional or personal reasons, you may review, edit, or delete your old activities from the log. Tosee and manage your activity, go to Settings and Privacy > Settings and open “Activity Log” under Your Activity.
3Enable Link History
Have you ever clicked on a link while scrolling on Facebook and wanted to revisit it later but couldn’t find it? You should enable Link History.
It’s a feature that lets you see the websites (or links) you’ve visited recently in Facebook’s mobile browser. To start keeping a record of your link history, you need to enable this feature. Note that this feature is exclusive to the Facebook app for Android and iPhone; it is not available on the Facebook website.
It only tracks links opened within the app; if a link opens directly in an external browser, it won’t be tracked. Also, links are deleted after 30 days. Facebook uses Link History data to improve the ad experience across Meta technologies. If you don’t want Facebook to track this data, it’s better to keep this feature disabled.
Check out how you can easilyactivate this feature and monitor the linksyou’ve recently visited on Facebook.
4Manage Your Time on Facebook
Given how easy it is to lose track of time you spend on social media, Facebook offers tools to help you manage your usage with its “Your Time on Facebook” feature. You can get a detailed breakdown of your daily and weekly activity, allowing you to view the average time spent on the app each day. This helps you become more aware of your usage patterns.
If you spend more time than you should, you can set daily time reminders and define a limit for your usage. When you reach your predetermined daily limit, Facebook will notify you, encouraging you to take a break and engage in offline activities. You can also use Quiet Mode to mute push notifications and limit notification dots.
To see how much time you spend on Facebook and manage your usage, go to Facebook Settings and click “Your Time on Facebook” under “Preferences.”
5Tackle Trolling by Disabling Comments
If your friends troll or tease you for sharing specific types of content, or you receive negativity when posting in public groups, you should use Facebook’s comment-disabling feature. This handy feature lets you turn off comments on your posts, helping you manage interactions and feedback more effectively.
Learnhow to turn off comments on your Facebook posts. Then, whenever someone spreads negativity on your posts or trolls you, shut down the discussion by turning off comments.
6Control the Visibility of Your Post
Sharing your content with the right audience is important for maintaining your privacy. Facebook provides several features to help you control who can see your posts. You can adjust the audience for individual posts or set a default audience for all future posts.
To change the visibility of a single post, create a new post, click on the globe icon, and select your preferred audience.
To adjust the visibility settings for future posts, go to Facebook settings and click on “Posts” under “Audience and Visibility.”
7Track the Ads You’ve Clicked On
Have you ever come across an intriguing ad on Facebook, clicked on it, and found a great deal, but accidentally hit the home button and lost the ad before you could make a purchase? If so, you should familiarize yourself with the Recent Ad Activity feature that keeps track of the ads you’ve recently clicked on. You can also save ads you want to check out later.
Toview your recent ad activity, tap on the three horizontal lines in the top-right or bottom-right corner, expand the “Security and Privacy” option, and tap “Recent Ad Activity.”
8Secure Your Account
Facebook providesseveral security featuresto safeguard your account from cyber threats and unauthorized access.
First, you can enable two-factor authentication, which adds an extra layer of security to your account. This feature requires you to verify your identity using an alternate authentication method when logging in from unrecognized devices. It helps prevent unauthorized access if your password is compromised.
Additionally, you can set up alerts for unrecognized logins to your account. This feature notifies you via email or within Facebook whenever there’s a login from an unfamiliar location or device. Facebook also allows you toview the devices where your account is logged inand remove unrecognized devices.
These lesser-known features on Facebook can significantly improve your experience on the platform. If you haven’t explored them yet, give them a try to see how beneficial they can be. Also, don’t forget to share your favorite features with friends and family so they can benefit from them as well.
