Facebook is a great tool for rekindling old friendships and promoting your business, but how do you keep your two worlds separate? The answer is a little known feature called ‘Friends Lists’.

Most Facebook users have all of their friends in one big messy list.  By grouping your friends into different lists, you can begin to manage privacy and access levels for each group.  For example, you can create a Friends List for your ‘Book Club’.  Then, create announcements, photo galleries, and events that only your book club can see.  There are a few very important things to remember about Friends Lists:

• Friends can belong to more than one Friends Lists.
• Friends Lists can have specific privacy policies applied to them.

For a basic set-up, I would create three groups: “Friends”, “Family”, and “Professional”.  These three groups can then be used to apply different privacy policies.  For example, you may want your friends to see photos from the party you were at last night, but you don’t want your family or professional contacts to see those photos.

Using Friends Lists is also extremely useful for organizing your friends if you have a lot of them.  For instance I have about 20 friend lists and I categorize people by city (New York, San Francisco, D.C., Tel Aviv, etc), where I met them (conferences, past co-workers, through this blog), and my relationship with them (professional, family, social, etc).

The video below shows you step-by-step how to create and add friends to lists in Facebook.

You can use your Facebook Friends Lists to control which groups can have access to your photo galleries.  Share photos of your kids with your “Family” but not your “co-workers” or “business associates”.  Only allow “college friends”, not your potential employers, to see your drunk party photos.

Facebook Photo Gallery Privacy Settings

…