Does this sound familiar to you? You add a large number of people to your friends list on Facebook and pretty soon you are getting tons of chat popups from random friends, when all you want to do is update your Facebook Status.
I’m sure this has frustrated you at one time or another and you just wished that certain “friends” would leave you alone. So what do you do in a situation like this? How can you get people to leave you alone without coming off as rude or heartless?
Well the trick is to stay invisible from most of the people in your friends list, while remaining online only to the people who you actually want to chat with. While this is a fairly simple task, many Facebook users are not aware of how to do this or that it is even an option.
Luckily it is an option and it all starts with the creation of Friend Lists. If you already have your friends grouped into lists on Facebook, then you’re already halfway done with this task.
We’ll go through the steps up setting of friend lists, appearing offline to specific lists of friends and then totally hiding those lists from our chat window. Let’s get started.
How to stay invisible from specific people:
Create Friends Lists
Before you can appear offline to specific people, you need put your friends into lists so that you can tell Facebook which friends you want to be hidden from. If you haven’t already grouped your friends into lists, then you can do so now following these steps.
From the Account menu in the top right of Facebook select “Edit Friends.” You’ll now be at the friends page where you can delete and search through your friends. Click on “Create a List” at the top of the page.
From the “Create a New List” window enter a name for your list and then select all the friends that you’d like to add to that list.
Side note: The next time you add a new friend or accept a friend request, you’ll be able to add them to one of your lists right away.
Once you finish creating your lists, the next thing to do is open Facebook Chat and move on to the next step.
Go Offline to Specific Friend Lists
Now when you open Facebook Chat, you should be able to see all of your Friend Lists that you just created. Each group will have a slider to the far right of the name; the slider will show green by default (meaning you’re showing online to that group).
In order go offline to that specific group of friends, you’ll need to click on the slider so that it turns gray. This will make you show offline those friends only. That’s it!
Hide Friend Lists in Chat
Finally, if you plan to always stay offline to a specific group, then you might as well totally hide that list from displaying in your chat window. You know the saying, “out of sight, out of mind.”
This step is pretty easy.
Just click on “Friend Lists” from the Facebook Chat window and then click on the list that you want to hide. The lists without a check mark next to them are the ones that are hidden.
That’s it, it will no longer display in your chat window until you choose to display it again.
Side note: You can even hide groups that you do show online to.
Staying Invisible On Facebook helps prevent unwanted chats:
So now the next time you hop on Facebook to quickly update your status or just to browse the timeline, you won’t have to be bothered with random chat messages. Using this easy technique, you can selective stay invisible from specific people. You can do what you need to do without being disturbed and you’ll still show as online to the friends that matter (to you).
