Earlier this week Facebook finally released their new simplified privacy controls to all users. While the changes won’t affect Pages or Groups, they do have a big impact on personal profile privacy settings.

At first glance, Facebook gives you the option to leave your privacy settings as they were or to allow each segment of your profile to be open to “everyone”. Everyone includes not only anyone on Facebook, but search engines feeding real time search results as well.

With all three search engines announcing real-time search results being integrated into universal search results this week, users need to be extra sensitive to their privacy settings within social media. Here are a few personal recommendations to keep your online reputation spic-and-span.

• Review your privacy settings in Facebook. Or review what information is on your Facebook profile. The photos of your wild Friday night might be fun for your friends to see but not for your boss.  Segment your Facebook friends into lists if you still want to be your boss/clients/partners friend on Facebook and use Facebook’s exclude feature on photo albums to keep your professional appearance.

• Un-tag yourself from any incriminating photos.  For when you can’t control what your ex-college roomate posts of you – there is always that un-tag feature.
• Consider removing information that may make it easy for someone to steal your identity.  Kent has posted about this threat in the past – you can read all the juicy details in his post: How social media networks facilitate identity theft.

Since Facebook pages and groups are more likely to be indexed and included in real time search results as there are less privacy walls, make sure your business page is posting often and using keywords in your Facebook page updates.  If you can do this without spamming hot topics, you may just find some new fans finding you through a traditional search engine!