3 Steps to a Better Facebook Newsfeed

In today’s post, I’m taking a break from talking about social media plans and strategies to help you with your personal Facebook newsfeed. If you’ve been using Facebook for any length of time, you’ve likely accumulated a multitude of friends and brand pages–some of which you interact with daily and others…not so much. Have you ever noticed that some of the people/brands you want to interact with more just aren’t appearing in your newsfeed anymore? They’ve fallen victim to the algorithm but I’m here to show you how to reclaim your Facebook newsfeed.

Cut the Crap

Seriously. If you’re not playing Farmville or any of those other games your friends are addicted to, keep these items from appearing in your newsfeed at all. Hover over the offending game message in your newsfeed and a little arrow/flag will appear in the top right corner of the message. Click on that and choose “Hide all posts from Farmville.” This works for messages about birthday calendars, horoscopes, and all other games.

Weed Out Your Friends

Yes, you can actually unfriend some of those people. If you don’t want to see their status updates anymore you have two choices. You can unfriend a person–they do not get a message informing them they’ve been unfriended. However, if you want to remain friends and not receive so many updates from that person, you can choose to receive only certain types of updates from them, or none at all. To change how much information you receive from a person, hover over their name to bring up their mini-profile. Now hover over the “friends” box and choose the appropriate option. You can use this method to unlike brand pages you no longer wish to see as well.

Check-In With Pages You Want to See

Now that you’ve weeded your garden, you need to replant some seeds in the Facebook algorithm. Check out a few of those friends you have been missing. Comment on something, say “hi” in a wall post, or like their most recent post. This lets Facebook know you want to interact with that person.

For brand pages, you need to do the same thing. Check into the pages you’ve been missing out on and leave a comment or like behind. While you’re there, you should double-check that you have checked “Show in Newsfeed”–you may have turned this option off previously and forgotten about it.

Rinse and Repeat

Now you need to wait and see what new and wonderful things pop up in your newsfeed. You’ll need to repeat these steps and new offenders appear in your newsfeed. The more you take control over what’s appearing, the more you’ll begin to see the things you want to see in your newsfeed. This will improve your “affinity” to the people and pages with which you want to interact.

Remember, however, everything is still subject to Facebook’s algorithm, so you will never see 100% of the posts from 100% of the people and pages you want to see if this is all you do. This method will bring you a lot closer, but it’s not perfect. Next week, join me again for a look at using lists as a way to see all the posts, but with a little more work.

I would love to know if this method helps you clean up your Facebook newsfeed. If it does, please let me know in the comments, or on my Facebook page.