Facebook is a constantly changing environment. It’s no longer as simple as it once was. You used to get notifications from everyone you were connected with – regardless of whether they were personal profiles or business pages. The notifications themselves, were shown in a decent order, with the most recent being at the top. But Facebook had to change the rules.

Now, the business Facebook pages you’ve liked have their notification hidden from you, under a separate pages feed. Your news feed decides what it shows you, picking only what it considers to be ‘top stories’ and, to be honest with you, it’s all gotten just a little out of hand.

Luckily, you can take back some control of your Facebook news feed – here’s how.

Set your news feed priorities

Go through and choose a few people who you want to prioritise in your news feed. You can do this in two ways. The first – go to their profile or page and, under ‘following’, select ‘see first’. The second way is to click ‘news feed’ on the left-hand side of your Facebook desktop site and select the three dots. You can then edit preferences, by prioritising who you want to see first.

Have a clear out

Over time we’ve liked lots of Facebook pages. We’ve also connected with a lot of people via friend requests. Unfortunately, we seldom go back through those pages and friends, to clear out the ones we’ve lost interest in or have no contact with. If you want to control your Facebook news feed, you need to set aside time to have a clear out – otherwise, you’re just going to keep seeing things you’re not interested in.

Go through your friend list and either unfriend or unfollow those people you’re not interested in, have no contact with, or who share things you’d rather not see. Do the same with those pages you’ve previously liked. You can do this by going to your profile and selecting ‘likes’ from the ‘more’ dropdown menu.

Stop liking things you’re not really interested in!

We’ve all done it. Someone sends us a page like request and, out of a sense of duty, we hit that ‘like’ button. That’s great if you’re genuinely interested in that page but, if you’re not, do yourself (and your feed) a favour – and unlike it again. The other option (if you don’t want to risk offending that friend), turn off the notifications for that page. Otherwise, you’re going to clog up your news feed with things you’re not interested in.

Give the algorithm a helping hand

Make it a regular habit that, if you see a post you dislike in your feed, take a second or two to select the three dots at the top right of the post and choose the ‘hide post’ option. This helps Facebook’s algorithm to know what you do and don’t like – so you’ll start to see less of those things you dislike. You can also unfollow or snooze posts from that person, within those options too.

Update your groups and their notifications

Finally, make sure you update your group settings. We tend to join a lot of groups, but, interact in only a few of them. Ideally, you want to be very active in a couple, whilst having a longer list of groups that you pop into only a couple of times a week. Any others left are the ones you’re not interested in. So, start by leaving those ones. Once you’ve done that, you can go back through and adjust the settings for each of the remaining groups. This includes turning off notifications all together (in which case, you may want to just leave the group) or opting for highlights only. For those groups that you are really active in or interested in (such as any of the VACT groups 😉) make sure you go in and select ‘see all notifications’.

By using the tips above, you can finally get some control back over your Facebook news feed. Not only will this help tidy up your feed, it will also help cut down on the amount of time it takes for you to update yourself on what’s going on in your Facebook world!

Do you feel that your Facebook news feed has been a bit of a battlefield lately? Did the above tips help – if so, which tip did you find most helpful? Maybe you’ve already got control of your news feed but didn’t realise you could do something mentioned above? In either case, why not share your thoughts and comments below!

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