There used to be a time when being social just meant going out, meeting new people and making friends in person. Increasingly, our idea of socializing has evolved from in-person meets to inculcate virtual meetups. Many of us now make friends online seamlessly and have conversations over the web. Facebook is a crucial hub where people, young and adults alike, gather to form a community and a network. We post on the platform about our lives, share pictures and stories, make friends and chat with different people.
And not only that, Facebook also keeps finding ways to encourage us to network with new people and grow our community more. It keeps suggesting new pages to follow, and new friends to make and connect with.
Lately, many of our Facebook readers have been coming to us with the question of whether or not Facebook suggests friends to us based on who visits our profiles. If you’re wondering if it’s the case too, grab a drink and keep reading.
In this blog, we will answer all your queries about Facebook friend suggestions. We’ll also explore everything from what they mean to how to hide your profile from being suggested to other people. Let’s get going!
Does Facebook Suggest Friends Who Look at Your Profile?
It is common for people to check out other people’s profiles on social media platforms like Facebook. All of us have done it at some point, haven’t we? Sometimes we’re searching for a particular someone, and sometimes it’s just by chance or out of curiosity.
Taking the particular case of Facebook, we also get a ton of suggestions in return – be it people, pages, or groups. Ever wonder what’s the algorithm behind these suggestions?
When Facebook – and let’s talk about people in particular – suggests a specific profile, how does it make that choice? Have these people viewed our profile? Have they searched for our username on the platform? Or are there other factors that determine it?
The friend suggestions on Facebook come under the section People you may know. There are several metrics that go behind this section using which the platform recommends friends to you.
To answer the question at hand, though, Facebook clearly outlines that it doesn’t show friend suggestions based on who views your profile. So, if you’re getting random suggestions on the platform, you don’t have to worry about them being your stalkers.
To maintain clarity and transparency with its users, Facebook has already defined the metrics which decide what comes under each user’s People you may know section. What are those metrics? Let’s find out in the next section!
Friend suggestions on Facebook: What do they mean?
As we’ve already established, Facebook is all about networking and building a community for yourself. The platform enables this by suggesting various people you might want to be friends with. Let’s try and uncover the metrics in play to make these decisions.
For the most part, the friend suggestions on Facebook appear with respect to the following metrics:
Common Friends
Having common friends with someone, also known as Friends of Friends. This is a common suggestion that users get, and you can identify it if you see mutual friends with the suggested friends.
Common interests
Another criteria that Facebook uses is your profile information. Trust us, your profile plays a huge part in it. Facebook analyzes things like your education, occupation, interests etc., and suggests people with similar details to you.
Mutual tagging and other activities
Next, Facebook suggests you friends based on your activity. If you’ve been tagged in a common post with somebody, or if you comment on the same post(s), Facebook is likely to recommend them to you.
Phonebook-synced contacts
Last but not the least, if you upload your contacts on Facebook or Messenger, Facebook is likely to suggest the Facebook users from your phonebook to you.
These are the criteria Facebook uses to suggest you friends. Now you don’t have to wonder if the friend suggestion you received is a creepy stalker visiting your profile randomly.
Facebook would never do that; if it has suggested you their profile, it has to be for much better reasons than that.
How to hide your profile from turning up in the Facebook Friend Suggestions?
We just established how Facebook recommends other people’s profiles to us. That just means, naturally, our profile is recommended to other people on the platform as well.
Now, we can understand how some users wouldn’t like that. If you too, do not want to turn up in the Facebook friend suggestions, keep reading to learn how to hide your profile from the section.
Now, get this: Facebook doesn’t have an option that you can just select and remove yourself from other people’s suggestions entirely.
However, what you can do is appear in that section as rarely as possible. For this, you’ll need to revamp your privacy settings a little. Let’s explore how!
Choose How people can find you on Facebook:
Choose how people can find you on Facebook. You can go to your Privacy settings and select How people can find you and contact you.
Here you can restrict people from looking you up via your email, phone number, as well as prevent any search engines from linking to your profile.
You can also choose who can send you friend requests. Select this option and choose Friends of Friends. This will restrict people who are not friends of your friends from adding you to their friend list; they will only be able to follow you.
Block the People you may know Notifications:
Another thing you can do is block People you may know notifications. These will appear in the Notifications settings. You can select People you may know and toggle off the notifications.
Disable your location on Facebook:
You can also disable your location so that Facebook doesn’t recommend you to people based on it. To do this, go to your Privacy settings and select Location. Then select Location Access and disable it.
Remember, all of these will only reduce the number of times you appear in other people’s friend suggestions. You cannot stop these suggestions completely; what you can do is decrease the frequency.
To sum up
We hope we were able to answer all your queries about why, what, and who encompass the People you may know section in Facebook.
Let’s quickly recap on everything we’ve learnt so far.
First, we explored whether Facebook suggests friends based on the people who visit our profiles, the answer to which is No. We then learnt about the different metrics Facebook does use to suggest friends to us.
Lastly, we figured out how we could prevent our profile from being shown in other people’s friend suggestions.
If you have any more doubts or questions about Facebook – or any other social media platform, for that matter – drop them in the comments below. We’ll try to resolve them in our upcoming blogs.
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