If you’re like me, you started using Facebook a while back, mostly for cultivating business contacts. Then one day, the college friends started showing up, followed by the high school friends and maybe a few family members.

Suddenly, your wall became an eclectic mosaic of everything from highly relevant business blog posts to photos tagged with a 30-year-younger version of you wearing… ahem… never mind. All in good fun, but maybe you want a little more control over what different people see, so the folks you’re trying to do business with aren’t subjected to all the noise from past lives.

Ideally, you should have a Facebook Page for your business if possible, but sometimes it’s easier to just use your personal profile to keep in touch with people. Fortunately, there is a simple way to make your Facebook profile a place where everyone from all the different phases of your life can coexist harmoniously. All you have to do is create “Friends Lists” to group people into, and adjust your Privacy Settings accordingly.

In your “Friends” page, there’s a box in the left column containing your “Friend Lists”.

Press the “Make a New List” button and start creating different lists to group your friends into. Think about what you want the different groups of people to see, and not see.

Perhaps there’s a group with whom you only want to share your Education and Work info, but nothing else. You might create a “Limited Profile” group for those folks.

There may be a group with whom you want to share everything except your mobile phone number or personal email address. You might create a “Limited Contact” group for them.