Chances are you know who your child was with and what they were doing after school but do you know what they were doing online after they finished their homework?
Just as we want to know where our kids are going and who they’re with on a regular basis to ensure their safety, it’s important to know which peers they’re playing online games with and socializing with on Facebook to ensure they’re growing up safely in the online world too.
If you’re thinking that the last thing you have time for is to learn and set up another tool to monitor Facebook activity, Safely Social Monitor is for you.
This brand new service is free, easy to setup, and provides parents with a wealth of information into their child’s Facebook world at a glance. As a choosy consumer and busy parent, I want a robust, yet easy-to-use service, that I can rely on as I look to facilitate conversations about the daily drama of friendships both on and offline.
About Safely Social Monitor
Signing up for and setting up a free Safely Social Monitor account can be done in a matter of minutes using four simple steps that will guide you through creating your account and connecting your kid’s Facebook account to the service. Enter your child’s email address linked to their Facebook, create the parent account, link the two together, and you’re done!
One of the most striking things about Safely Social Monitor is quickly you can navigate through the information generated about your family’s Facebook activity thanks to the simple interface. A preview of the number of friends your child has, top friends, and photo thumbnails is generated and sent to your email.
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| Safely Social Monitor generates a report that is automatically sent via email |
Safely Report
The Safely Report’s main screen provides an overall score for your child’s activity. What does the score mean? According to Safely Social Monitor, the single score comprises several categories of safety the makes it easy for parents to understand and act upon if necessary. Scoring is out of 100 and according to the service, “90 is typical typical of a kid practicing safe Facebook activities. A score of less than 60 may warrant extra attention to the sections causing the low score. And if your kid scores 100, you have the perfect networking angel!”
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| Safely Report’s score feature is color coded according to your child’s overall Facebook activity |
I appreciate that the color of the child’s score corresponds to their Facebook behavior. It allows me to quickly tell if my child is using Facebook in a safe way or if I need to do some further investigating with my child about what might constitute unsafe online behavior.
Friends
The second portion of Safely Social Monitor consists of information about friends displayed as 5 Top Friends, 3 New Friends, and Age Distribution and Gender.
The second portion of Safely Social Monitor consists of information about friends displayed as 5 Top Friends, 3 New Friends, and Age Distribution and Gender.
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| Screenshot of my Friends screen. I removed full names and ages from the image to protect the identity of my friends |
The 5 Top Friends your child interacts with are displayed and includes their Facebook avatar. Having friends’ full name helps me put a name with a face.
3 New Friends section provides more detailed information with avatars and includes gender, age, city, state, and the name of their school as pulled from their Facebook profile.
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| The 3 newest friends appear along with additional information about who they are |
The graphic display of the circles indicating overall percentages of gender and age ensures your child is interacting with similarly aged peers and helps complete the picture of who your child’s friends are on Facebook.
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| Graphic display of age and gender of friends is easy-to-read |
Need more information about your child’s friends? Click on Friends located in the green box to for a more detailed page providing information about the kinds of interaction occurring between top friends such as number of conversations with each other, photos together, and number of liked status updates, photos, and interests.
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| Screenshot of my top friends provides additional info about the kinds of interactions your child is having on Facebook |
Also view all friends by paging through 25 avatars at a time using the blue arrow to the right of the thumbnails.
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| Ordinarily All Friends displays name, gender, and sometimes age. Since this is a peek at my screen, I’ve deleted info about my friends to protect their identities |
Photos
Although media reports make it seem like uploaded and tagged photos could be our kids’ downfall as they look towards college and future jobs, they don’t have to be when you can see the newest photos that tag your child and ones that they’ve uploaded.
Just as more information can be gathered about friends, delve in further by using the green navigation box to view thumbnails of all of the newest photos, photos your child is tagged in, and uploaded photos can be viewed. Since some accounts have lots of photos, I like how I can view a batch of a dozen thumbnails at a time to scan for content just like I can page through countless friends!
Won’t my kids feel like I’m spying on them in order to keep them safe?
It depends on how you approach it. Kids will always feel like you are invading their privacy if you engage in behavior that doesn’t involve them. Safely Social Monitor is not meant to be a spying tool. Instead, I see it as a service that can be used to create family dialogue around online safety.
Discussing hot topics relating to internet safety and raising awareness about the rewards, risks, and privilege of having a Facebook account is a great first step. Work with your children so they understand your need to know who they’re with and where they’re going when they aren’t in school and why it’s just as important to know who they’re talking to and what sites they’re visiting online.
Sit down together. Talk about Safely Social Monitor and show them how it is designed to reassure you about their Facebook activity rather than as a covert tool for spying.
Why would I trust Safely Social Monitor?
With a dizzying array of tools and programs available, I look to companies with known track records of providing tools that can keep my family safe when looking for a solution to help keep my kids safe online. Safely Social Monitor is a service developed by Location Labs, a company with a history of providing services that enhance the safety of millions of families through cell phones. The Safely family includes includes: Safely Locate, a mobile location service available via AT&T FamilyMap, Sprint Family Locator and T-Mobile FamilyWhere; Safely Drive, the only carrier-grade, patent-pending safe-driving service on the market, available via Sprint DriveFirst and T-Mobile DriveSmart Plus; and now Safely Social Monitor, that helps parents stay informed about kids’ social network activities.
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| Safely Social Monitor is part of an entire suite of products that emphasizes family safety. |
Impressive, right?
With Safely Social Monitor as part of an entire suite of services designed with family safety in mind, rest assured that it can be your trusted partner to ensure proper social networking on Facebook.
Try Safely Social Monitor by signing up for a free account.
I am a consultant to Location Labs and have been compensated for my time in reviewing and writing about Safely Social Monitor.
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Original post by Tech Savvy Mama
©2012
Noice! I’ll tell all the mommas and poppas in town about this. Good stuff.
The service sounds interesting. But does it work only if my kid friends me on facebook? My kid doesn’t want to friend me because he finds it embarrassing to have Mom on his friends list. I’ve also heard from other parents that my kid can set privacy controls to hide stuff from me. How does the company prevent stalkers from using the service to see my kid’s activities?
-Mom of a 14 year old