Use The ‘Soft Publish’ For Discrete Facebooking

Sometimes, you want to publish something on Facebook without making a giant deal about it. And if you’re one of those who actually considers the cleanliness and content of other peoples’ feeds, God bless you. A tool that can help in that endeavour is the “soft publish”.

Too much attention picture by Shutterstock

The “soft publish” technique is what I use when I want something to be there, but not necessarily show up in everyone’s news feeds. Facebook has a ‘more more more’ attitude towards sharing, and makes a big song and dance every time you upload one or two new photos to an album.

You can avoid this by changing the permissions on whatever you want to publish to “Only Me” at the time of publication. Later on, when you deem it “safe”, you can change the permissions again to include everyone else. This can be done for a post, an album, or – in the case of uploading just a few new photos to an album – change the permissions on the entire album until later. Otherwise Facebook will resurface the news to the top of everyone’s feed to scrutinise why you’re editing the past.

The longer you wait, the less likely it is to show up in anyone’s feed. When you edit the permissions for other people to see, it effectively puts it into peoples’ feeds so low that they’ll never scroll down to it, especially if they’re using an app like SocialFixer to force their Facebook into chronological order. Be warned, though — newly tagged photos will still show up at the top of your tagged pile.

If you’re like me, you have everyone separated into different groups with different permissions. Some for work, some for your personal life. And you can use the same technique to soft launch content into different groups. First for your Close Friends, then Friends, then Acquaintances, if you so desire.

Maybe you want to do something incognito, maybe you’re a privacy nut like me, or maybe you’re just considerate with regards to other peoples’ mental energy and don’t want to waste their time with trivial stuff. For all those moments, the soft publish should help.