Did you know that with Facebook’s new privacy features its possible to have full control over who views your status messages and who doesn’t, down to the finest finessing? Considering the increase of children friends on Facebook I think its really wise to have at least a “Children” exclusion list to select when making risque updates.

I will show you how to create lists to exclude children or work colleagues or the people you don’t know so well or people who have been pretty judgmental in the past. It’s really easy. This step by step tutorial you’ll only need to do once, but once you have done it, you’ll be able to find your way back to fine tune it with new people as time goes by. Or you can just bookmark this tutorial and come back later.

You might already have noticed that every time you create a new status update, you can click on the padlock underneath the area to select whether “everyone” sees it, “friends of friends”, “friends”, or just you. Each time I create one I carefully consider these options and always select something. That’s the basic option. But if you need to be careful who views your updates you can follow these instructions:

STEP 1: Click on your “Home” button (top right menu), then “Friends” (left menu) to get to this friend list view page pictured below. Then click on “+ Create a list” button (top middle).

STEP 2: Select the friends you want to add to the list. You can scroll down to see them all, type in a name, etc. Typing in names is faster for me, but browsing all I notice people I’ve forgotten about, so its more thorough.

When you’re done creating your list and given it a memorable name, you can review your new creation by going back to the friend list view page, just to make sure you’re happy with it. (step 1 instructions show you how to get there). Though the reviewing part isn’t necessary if you’re pretty savvy.

Now you’re ready to create your custom status updates with confidence!

STEP 3: Write your status message. Before clicking “Share” click the padlock so you can select “customize”:

STEP 4: The “Custom Privacy” box will pop up (pictured below). Select the general group you want to make this visible to from the dropdown. Then under “hide this from” type in the name of the group or type in a particular friend’s name you want to exclude. Type and add them one at a time so they can each go in as separate entities. You can even set this particular customization as your default setting from now on by checking the box at the bottom right. Now press save to close the custom privacy box. And you are ready to press the “Share” button when you are happy with your status message.

Once published you can hover over the padlock icon under your new status update to get the tooltip. It will confirm your selection. This status update setting is not changeable. Those excluded people will never be able to read your status update when they are logged in as themselves. They wont even know there’s something missing. They will just see the rest of the stuff on your wall. They wont even see other friends comments on it on their homepage newsfeed, it will be completely as if it never existed.

(Note this tutorial can also be used to create custom lists for your favourites, like family members, your homeboyz, your favourite friends etc, so that your homepage news feed can be switched to various list views. So its quite useful to know this technique.)