by Holly Rogers

Created on: November 18, 2009

Facebook provides a wonderful resource for connecting with past or present friends. It opens up the opportunity to communicate with distant friends and keep up to date with the exciting news and experiences that you may normally not hear about. This makes Facebook a very popular social networking tool, however as with all forms of communication, there also comes the unwanted attention as well.

When signing up to a public communication network, you are always going to be opening yourself up to the risk of having unwanted individuals attempting to contact you. These may be people attempting to scam you, by finding out your personal details, or they may simply be unpleasant individuals who you simply do not wish to talk to or hear from. Either way, there will always be a risk of such negative attention on Facebook, therefore it is vital to know the different ways to help minimise such contact from occurring.

One of the best ways to begin in avoiding unwanted messages is to make your Facebook profile private. This means that only people on your approved friends list can access your entire page and personal details. The only details other people can see are your profile picture, name and a few of the people you are friends with. To change your profile to private, go into your account settings, into the security settings and you can change your profile to limited profile. This will not prevent strangers from sending you messages to your account inbox, but it will prevent them from being able to see your activity on Facebook and message you on your message board or chat.

The next step in helping avoid unwanted attention is to ensure you only add friends who you know. By adding strangers, you are opening yourself up to the risk that they could be attempting to scam individuals on Facebook, by first pretending to be a real person to gain your trust. Only accept invites from people you know. It is also a good idea to only join groups and add applications that appear safe. By joining a fan group, your profile is suddenly circulated to a whole new group of strangers, who may decide to message you based on joint interests. While this may be harmless, if you are trying to avoid strangers messaging you, joining groups and fan pages does not help you with this.

If there is a particular person who is sending you messages, a good option is to block them. You will have this option based on any correspondence they send you. It will come up with a 'block user' icon. Simply click on this, and the person will no longer be able to see any of your activity or communicate with you in any way. They will not know they have been blocked either.

Overall, the best advice for avoiding unwanted messages on Facebook is to keep your personal information private, and avoid putting your information out there for all to see. Stick to the people you know and be aware of the tools available to avoid unwanted attention.

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