Facebook has been around for two decades and it is still, for most people, the place their family, their friends, their communities and half the internet they actually care about live. Yet the features that give you control over it are buried several menus deep, and almost nobody has read them.
These fifteen tips are the ones worth the ten minutes. They cost nothing, they work whether you post daily or once a year, and between them they cover privacy, the feed, notifications, groups, Marketplace, account security and getting your data back. Some of them you will use every week; a few you will use once and be glad you did.
Table of Contents
- 1. Run Privacy Checkup Twice a Year
- 2. Fill In Your About Section Properly
- 3. Set Your Default Audience Before You Post
- 4. Hide a Post From Specific People
- 5. Edit a Post After Publishing
- 6. Use Drafts So You Do Not Post the Wrong Thing
- 7. Save Posts Into Named Collections
- 8. Tune Notifications to What Actually Matters
- 9. Decide Which Groups Deserve Your Attention
- 10. Control Reels and Watch Time
- 11. Use Marketplace Safely
- 12. Review Where You Are Logged In
- 13. Turn On Two-Factor Authentication
- 14. Download a Copy of Your Data
- 15. Know the Difference Between Deactivate and Delete
1. Run Privacy Checkup Twice a Year
Who can see your posts, who can message you, which apps are connected, which ads you are eligible to see — Facebook groups all of this under a single tool called Privacy Checkup, and almost nobody opens it. Find it under Settings & privacy → Privacy checkup.
It walks you through every category one at a time and shows you your current setting with a plain explanation of what it means. Most people discover at least one thing they have never consciously chosen — a post audience set to “Friends except” that they forgot about, a location history setting, or an app that has had access to your profile for two years.
Set a recurring reminder. Twice a year is enough to catch new defaults and anything a friend installed on your behalf, and it takes about ten minutes. Put it in the same calendar slot as your password rotation, because it is the same kind of housekeeping.
2. Fill In Your About Section Properly
Your About section is how people find and judge you when they land on your profile, and most people leave it as it was in 2012. It takes five minutes to fix and it changes how seriously people take you.
Fill in your basic details — where you live, where you work, where you went to school — because those power the people-you-may-know suggestions and the groups you are offered. Add your current work and education entries properly rather than leaving stale ones. Write a short intro that says what you actually do, in plain language, rather than a job title on its own. “Freelance illustrator, mostly pet portraits and children’s books” tells someone far more than “Illustrator”.
Then set your profile picture to something people can recognise at small size, and your cover photo to something that will not embarrass you if it is the first thing a prospective employer sees. This is a public profile, and it is often the first impression you make online.
3. Set Your Default Audience Before You Post
The single most common privacy mistake on Facebook is assuming the audience of your new post matches the audience of your last post. It does not, unless you set the default yourself.
Go to Settings & privacy → Settings → Audience and Visibility, and look at the section on what happens by default when you post and when you add a new group. Most people are set to “Friends”, which is reasonable; many are set to “Public” without realising it, which is the setting that turns a holiday photo into a piece of targeted advertising.
Set it deliberately to whatever matches how you actually use the platform, and then you will stop having to think about it on every single post. If you mostly post family photos, set the default to Friends. If you post to a professional audience, set it to Public and handle the group posts separately. What matters is that the setting is a decision rather than an accident.
4. Hide a Post From Specific People
Sometimes you want everyone to see a post except one person. Rather than sending a long, awkward message, use the built-in control: open the post, tap the three dots, choose “Hide post” or “Who can see this post?” and exclude that name.
This is a genuinely useful option because it removes the post from that person’s feed entirely. They are not notified, the post is not marked as hidden, and nobody sees a strange empty gap. It is the difference between a discreet exclusion and a visible one.
The same menu offers “Hide from feed”, which removes the post from your own home page without deleting it. That is worth knowing about too, because it is the right tool for the content you still want to have posted but no longer want to see every time you open the app.
5. Edit a Post After Publishing
Posted the wrong thing, or made a typo? You can edit most published posts. Open the post, tap the three dots and choose Edit post. You can change the text, and on some types of post you can also change the image and the audience.
What you cannot do is quietly rewrite history. Edits are marked, and on some post types an edit history is visible to viewers. That is a feature — it means a correction is honest rather than a cover-up — but it is worth knowing before you assume an edit erases anything.
For a genuine take-back, you need Delete. On most posts, the three-dot menu gives you Move to trash, which sends the post to Recently Moved and deletes it permanently after a short window. If you have deleted something you want back, check Recently Moved in your Activity Log first, because it stays recoverable there for a little while.
6. Use Drafts So You Do Not Post the Wrong Thing
Facebook has a drafts feature, and it solves the specific problem of writing something, losing your nerve, and then posting it anyway at two in the morning because the composer was still open on your phone.
Write a post, then instead of hitting Post, tap the down-arrow or the three dots in the composer and choose Save draft. It is saved to the drafts section of the composer and, on the mobile app, it can be resumed from the same place later. When you come back to it, you can finish the thought, check it, and publish properly.
Drafts are also the right home for anything with a link in it. A link preview can be embarrassing or wrong, and a draft gives you the chance to see the preview before anyone else does. If you write a post with a link and the preview looks broken, delete it from the text, paste it again, and wait for the preview to refresh before saving.
7. Save Posts Into Named Collections
The Saved tab is one of the most underused features on Facebook, and it is genuinely valuable if you use it properly. It works like a bookmarking system with full-text search, which means you can find a recipe, a product recommendation, or a piece of advice you saw eight months ago.
But a single undifferentiated pile of saved posts is useless. Open the Saved tab, create Collections, and give them names you will actually search for: “Recipes”, “Garden”, “Trips — Japan”, “Things to buy”, “Send to Priya”. Every time you save something, put it in the right one immediately.
From there you can share a whole collection with someone in one click, which is far more useful than forwarding forty separate links. A collection you have named is a reference library. A pile of unsorted bookmarks is a landfill.
8. Tune Notifications to What Actually Matters
The average person gets dozens of Facebook notifications a day, and then wonders why they have stopped opening the app. The fix is not willpower; it is configuration.
Go to Settings & privacy → Notifications, and work through the categories. Turn off everything you do not genuinely act on — most people find that “Suggestions”, “Watch” and “Memories” generate more noise than value. Reduce the frequency for friends and groups to the lowest useful setting, which turns them into a weekly summary rather than a stream. And turn on notifications for the things you would be genuinely annoyed to miss: direct messages from close people, comments on your own posts, and security alerts.
Push notifications for comments on your own posts deserve special mention, because it is how a page or a small business actually gets feedback on something they published. It is also one of the few notification types where a fast reply genuinely matters to the other person.
9. Decide Which Groups Deserve Your Attention
Facebook groups are the best thing and the worst thing about the platform, and the difference is almost entirely in how you manage them. A group can be the most valuable feed on the internet for you, or it can be a source of permanent noise.
For every group, open the menu and check its notification level. Set the important ones to All posts or Highlights, and set the rest to Quiet or Off. The default for most groups is All posts, which means every single conversation in a busy group generates a notification — and that is where notification fatigue usually begins.
Use Quiet mode when you need to catch up on a group without being interrupted by it, then switch back when you are ready. Leaving groups you no longer care about is even better than muting them, because it removes them from the “Groups you might like” suggestions too. Most people are in three times as many groups as they actually read.
10. Control Reels and Watch Time
Reels are the feature people most often want to control and least often configure. The default behaviour is deliberately infinite: the next video starts the instant the current one ends, so twenty minutes can disappear without you noticing.
Open Settings & privacy → Settings → Reels and set Autoplay to Never, or to “Wi-Fi only” if you want them on mobile data but not on a train. Then use Take a break in the Reels menu to set a time limit — fifteen minutes is a reasonable starting point — after which the app stops serving you short videos.
The other setting worth finding is the preference to show fewer suggested content pages. It sits in the Reels settings and it reduces the number of recommendations drawn from accounts you have never interacted with. If you only want to see Reels from people you actually know, this is the switch that makes that true.
11. Use Marketplace Safely
Marketplace is where you can buy and sell almost anything locally, and where the most common scams live. A few habits make it safe enough to use regularly.
Keep every conversation on the platform. Facebook’s protections apply to messages inside Messenger and nowhere else, so a seller who immediately asks you to move to email, WhatsApp or phone is telling you something. Meet in public places for high-value items, ideally in daylight, and bring someone with you. Pay in person when you can see the item. Never send a deposit, a friend’s name’s bank details, or a gift card to someone you have not met.
On the buying side, check the profile before you pay. A brand-new account with no friends, no posts and a brand-new profile photo is a warning sign. Use the buyer protection that appears in the checkout when you are buying something expensive, and if a listing seems too good to be true, it is. Second-hand bargains priced at a fifth of retail value are not bargains; they are the most common bait there is.
12. Review Where You Are Logged In
Settings & privacy → Settings → Security → Where you’re logged in shows every device and location with an active session on your account. Check it every couple of months, and check it immediately if anything feels off.
You are looking for two things. First, devices you do not recognise — remove them, and change your password. Second, sessions on devices you no longer own, which happen constantly when you replace a phone or reinstall an app, and which are pure downside because nobody is going to sign out of those for you.
When you remove a session, it signs that device out immediately. The listing also shows which city and roughly when each session was active, which is what makes it useful: an entry from a city you have never visited is far more informative than an unfamiliar device name.
13. Turn On Two-Factor Authentication
This is the one item on this list that is not optional. A password alone is no longer enough, because credential-stuffing attacks against leaked password databases are automated, cheap and constant. A second factor turns a stolen password into nothing.
Go to Settings & privacy → Settings → Security and login → Two-factor authentication, then choose between an authenticator app and SMS. An authenticator app is more secure because SMS messages can be intercepted, but SMS is far more convenient and considerably better than nothing. Set it up, store your recovery codes somewhere safe and offline, and move on.
While you are in that section, also check Third-party app access and remove anything you do not recognise or no longer use. Every connected app is another door into your account, and several of them are far less likely to have been logging in recently than you might assume.
14. Download a Copy of Your Data
You can ask Facebook for a complete archive of everything you have posted, messaged, saved and liked. It is a genuinely useful safety net, and it is one of the least known features on the platform.
Go to Settings & privacy → Settings → Privacy Checkup → Download your information. Choose the format — JSON if you want the raw structured data, HTML if you want to read your posts in a browser — pick the date range, and request the file. Facebook prepares it and emails you a download link, which can take hours or even a day depending on how much you have accumulated.
Do it once a year, and do it before you make any significant change to your account. If you ever need to appeal a decision about a post, or you are migrating away from Facebook, or you simply want your own copy of a decade of posts and messages, this is the only way to get it.
15. Know the Difference Between Deactivate and Delete
These two options sit next to each other in Account Settings and do completely different things. Confusing them is how people accidentally lose years of content — and also how people think they have deleted something when they have not.
Deactivate hides your profile and stops it appearing to other people, but nothing is deleted. Your posts, photos and comments stay exactly where they are, and you can log back in at any time and everything returns. This is the right choice for a break, and it is completely reversible.
Delete is permanent. Your profile is removed, your posts and comments are deleted, and your photos and videos are gone. There is a short grace period, after which it cannot be undone. Before you do either, request your data archive first — because deletion does not wait while you download.
If you only want to disappear for a while, deactivate. If you have genuinely decided to leave, download your archive, then delete. And if a deadline is forcing the decision, say so: people often deactivate temporarily under pressure and permanently delete a decision they had not actually made.
Conclusion
None of these fifteen tips takes more than a few minutes, and together they take control of an account that has quietly accumulated hundreds of default settings you never chose. Set your default audience, turn on two-factor authentication, run the privacy checkup, curate your notifications, and save your data — that single afternoon of housekeeping is most of it.
The rest is small daily habits: check the domain before you type a password, keep marketplace conversations on-platform, and put a saved post in a collection instead of a pile. Facebook is not going to hand you a cleaner feed than the one you have configured. It is going to give you exactly what you asked for — which, once you have decided what that is, is a much better deal.