While many people go on Facebook to check in with their friends, family, or customers, a lot of people simply don’t have the time or desire to take a closer at how to improve their user experience. And if you’re like most people, you probably know how to use Facebook well enough that you don’t feel like you need to bother learning anymore. But you may be missing out on handy tips and settings that can make your Facebook experience more secure and convenient. Here are five of them.
Know if you forget to logout
It happens to the best of us. You used a computer other than your own and are unsure if you logged out. So what do you do? No need to worry, Facebook makes it incredibly easy to find out which devices you’re currently logged in on.
Just navigate to Settings, Security and then Where You’re Logged In. From there, you can see all the devices you’re logged into, and logout remotely from any of them.
Save interesting articles for later
Have you ever noticed an interesting article in your news feed that you’d love to read, but don’t have the time to do so there and then? Have you tried to find that same article later with little luck? Never deal with this annoyance again. Many people are completely unaware that Facebook allows you to conveniently save articles for later reading.
To do this, click on the drop-down arrow in the upper right-hand corner of the article, and then click Save link. When you finally have a free moment to give the article a read, click on the Saved tab located under Favorites in the left-hand sidebar on the news feed page.
Export important event dates to your calendars
If you’ve ever missed a birthday or an event because you forgot to list them on your main calendar, this Facebook tip may come in handy. You can export all these important dates to your Google or Apple calendar.
To the left of your news feed, click on the Events tab. Navigate to the highlighted box (very bottom of the right-hand side) that reads You can add your events to…, and then click the Learn More link. This will take you to a page that explains how to export your events and birthdays.
Set alerts for new logins
Paranoid about someone hacking into your account? If so, you can easily set alerts to notify you right away if someone logs into your account from a new device.
Navigate to Settings, Security and then Login Alerts. From here, simply choose how you’d like to be notified of suspicious logins from new devices or browsers: by email, text message, or Facebook notification.
Lose the targeted ads
You may have noticed that ads of businesses you’ve visited on the web have somehow found their way into your Facebook news feed. This is by no means an accident. Like other websites that use targeted ads, Facebook uses cookies to determine which sites you’ve visited, and then shows you ads from those same sites.
If you’d like to turn ad targeting off, navigate to Settings and then Ads. From here you can change all the settings that determine the types of ads you see in your Facebook news feed. While there’s no way to completely turn off ads altogether, by changing your settings here you can make the ads you see more random and less personal. Essentially, your internet activity will no longer be tracked by Facebook cookies.
